Urban Secularism: Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe 2020039831, 2020039832, 9780367335670, 9780429320606

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Urban Secularism

While French laïcité is often considered something fixed, its daily deployment is rather messy. What might we learn if we study the governance of religion from a dynamic bottom-up perspective? Using an ethnographic approach, this book examines everyday secularism in the making. How do city actors understand, frame and govern religious diversity? Which local factors play a role in those processes? In Urban Secularism: Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe, Julia Martínez-Ariño brings the reader closer to the entrails of laïcité. She provides detailed accounts of the ways religious groups, city officials, municipal employees, secularist actors and other civil-society organisations negotiate concrete public expressions of religion. Drawing on rich empirical material, the book demonstrates that urban actors draw and (re-)produce dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion, and challenge static conceptions of laïcité and the nation. Illustrating how urban, national and international contexts interact with one another, the book provides researchers with a deeper understanding of the multilevel governance of religious diversity. Julia Martínez-Ariño is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Religion at the University of Groningen. She is interested in the governance of religious diversity, apostasy in Catholic countries and the heritagisation of the Jewish past.

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Urban Secularism

Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe

Julia Martínez-Ariño

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Julia Martínez-Ariño The right of Julia Martínez-Ariño to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Martínez-Ariño, Julia, author. Title: Urban secularism : negotiating religious diversity in Europe / Julia Martínez-Ariño. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY, USA : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge advances in sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020039831 (print) | LCCN 2020039832 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367335670 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429320606 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Secularism—Europe. | Laicism—Europe. | Europe—Religion. Classification: LCC BL2747.8 .M36 2021 (print) | LCC BL2747.8 (ebook) | DDC 306.6094—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039831 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039832 ISBN: 978-0-367-33567-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32060-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Für Marwan Para Eli e Ibón

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

viii 1

1 Municipal policy instruments regulating religious diversity

13

2 Actor constellations: who is in and who is out?

38

3 Vivre ensemble and other “urban myths of conviviality”

57

4 Re-shaping laïcité: how urban secularism defines religious normality

79

5 From the national to the urban and back: how state secularism travels

97



Conclusion: urban secularism and the politics of inclusion and exclusion

117

References Index

124 139

Acknowledgements

Many people and institutions made it possible for me to finish this book. First and foremost, I am indebted to my research participants. Merci aux personnes interviewées dans le cadre de cette recherche dans les villes de Rennes, Bordeaux et Toulouse et particulièrement aux membres du Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes. Votre participation m’a fourni de grandes connaissances sur le terrain et je vous remercie de votre amabilité. Merci aussi à Frank Laporte pour sa générosité et les conversations enrichissantes que nous avons eues. Je voudrais aussi remercier les collègues des universités françaises qui m’ont aidée à mieux comprendre le contexte français, en particulier Corinne Bonnet, Martine Cohen, Xavier Itçaina, Alice Picard, Philippe Portier, Jean-Paul Willaime et Anne-Laure Zwilling. At the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, I received incredibly useful feedback when designing and conducting the research on which this book is based. Thanks go, in particular, to my CityDiv teammates Christian Jakobs, Christine Lang, Michalis Moutselos, Maria Schiller, Karen Schönwälder and Alexander Tandé. I would also like to thank the Institute for its financial support and the never-ending good moments with the Gö crazys in Göttingen and beyond. A big thank-you goes to my colleagues at the Department of the Comparative Study of Religion for their feedback on early drafts of some chapters. In department meetings I received insightful comments from Kholoud Al-Ajarma, Brenda Bartelink, Peter Berger, Marjo Buitelaar, Kim Knibbe, Brenda Mathijssen, Elizabeth Mudzimu, Hanneke Muthert, Saara Toukolehto, Stefania Travagning, Anja Visser, Kocku von Stuckrad and Jelle Wiering. I am particularly thankful to Joram Tarusarira for the endless inspiring conversations over a cup of coffee and feedback on many of the chapters, and to Méadhbh McIvor and Erin Wilson, who also took the time to read parts of the manuscript. I would also like to thank the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen for their economic support when preparing the book proposal. The arguments in this book were improved by the feedback I received at the many conferences and workshops I attended throughout the writing process, as well as by the comments and suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers of the

Acknowledgements ix

book proposal. I’d like to thank these colleagues for their generous engagement with my work, especially Víctor Albert Blanco, Marian Burchardt, Anna Clot, Frédéric Dejean, Carolina Esteso, Mar Griera, David Koussens, Rosa MartínezCuadros and Alexander K. Nagel. I am also immensely grateful for the editorial work of John Tallmadge, who helped me put my ideas on paper using almost 30% fewer words. His thorough reading of the text made it clearer and sharpened the prose. Routledge editor Emily Briggs, editorial assistant Lakshita Joshi and the production team have been hugely supportive and helpful throughout the whole process. One cornerstone in my writing process has been Kel Weinhold, who provided me with new tools for making my writing more enjoyable, keeping my writing life “sane”, and who encouraged me to move on when I was bored with the project. As a result of her coaching programme, I met a fellow “Unstuckling” in Groningen, Rineke Verbrugge, with whom, first physically at a café and then virtually when the pandemic arrived, I have sat for many hours writing the chapters of this book. Having a regular writing partner has been extremely helpful throughout the process. I wrote this book at the same time as Gloria Maité Hernández, another Unstuckling, wrote hers. We worked as accountability partners and much more than that, always with a screen (and a six-hour time difference) between us. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic ruined our plans of meeting in-person before our books were published, I’m sure we will meet one day, hopefully sooner rather than later. Thanks for the weekly check-ins and the wise advice. Besides the professional side of things, I would also like to thank death Brenda, sex Brenda, Erin, Méadhbh, Kim, Joram, Oihane, Mau, Gloria, Mar and Anna for the emotional support and for making academia a better place to work. Yasemin, Stela, Diyan and Ali made the transition to Groningen smooth and were there for me when I needed fresh air. A handful of employees at Coffee Company Carolieweg nurtured me during the writing process with carefully prepared café lattes. A las chicas del Labo, they never stopped listening to my mental paellas; they were and are constantly supportive to me. Finally, I would like to thank my dad, my sister, Chabi and Teresa, who encouraged me throughout the process and pushed me when I was tired of it. You won’t read the book, but I know you will at least reach this point, so . . . ¡gracias!

Introduction

In the summer of 2016, more than 30 French coastal cities banned the use of burkini on municipal beaches, arguing that the garment fails to respect “good manners” and the principle of laïcité. Despite these decrees being overruled by the Conséil d’État, the highest administrative court in France, the controversy spread globally. In a similar vein, disputes around the construction of mosques have arisen and been studied in a number of cities within and beyond Europe (Astor, 2012; Fourot, 2010; Gale, 2005; Isin & Siemiatycki, 1999; Vahed, 2015). The significance of these conflicts lies in what they say about the unease toward Islam in Europe and Western democracies where Muslims have sought to increase their visibility (Kuppinger, 2014). Projects for the construction of minarets, in particular, have generated controversies so heated that Switzerland, for example, amended its constitution in 2009 to ban them altogether (Mayer, 2011). However, controversies over urban expressions of religiosity do not relate exclusively to Islam. The erection of eruvs by Jews has also encountered opposition in European and North American cities (Siemiatycki, 2005; Watson, 2005), and a statue of Pope John Paul II with a cross in the French town of Ploërmel generated controversy because its location in a public square allegedly violated the 1905 law of the separation of church and state. While the construction of places of worship, the wearing of ostentatious religious symbols in public spaces—mainly the niqab and burka—and the holding of religious celebrations and collective prayers in the streets are the most evident and visible signs of urban public religiosity, other lower-profile issues, such as responses to dietary requirements in school canteens made by Jewish and Muslim families and the funding of interfaith activities where a variety of traditions meet, are also of concern and interest to city authorities. This book is about the urban governance of religious diversity as an evolving set of processes and negotiations in Western Europe and beyond. I compare how French cities mould and deploy state secularism, commonly referred to as laïcité. Although cities have limited regulatory capacities, they enjoy a certain room to manoeuvre within their borders. Street-level bureaucrats, too, have a certain degree of control over policy implementation (Linder & Peters, 1989; Prottas, 1978). My understanding of secularism resonates with Saba Mahmood’s (2016, p. 3) notion

2 Introduction

of “the modern state’s sovereign power to reorganize substantive features of religious life, stipulating what religion is or ought to be, assigning its proper content, and disseminating concomitant subjectivities, ethical frameworks, and quotidian practices”. Accordingly, I do not treat laïcité as an analytical category, but rather as an object of analysis—one with historically changing political meanings. Second, the book examines how these urban policies and the negotiations around them re-cast and reproduce “dominant discourses” (Baumann, 1996) on “acceptable religiosity” and the place of religion in the public sphere in the aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and 13 November terrorist attacks in Paris. At that point, as a form of “narrative secularism” with normative power (Amiraux & Koussens, 2016), laïcité1 had gained momentum in public debates in France over immigrant incorporation, vivre ensemble (social cohesion) and the need to strengthen citizens’ commitment to “les valeurs de la République” (the “values of the Republic”). For example, a new plan implemented by the education system after the attacks focused on reinforcing secularism in schools (Fassin, 2015). Moreover, discourses that define laïcité as the fourth pillar of the Republic—next to liberté, égalité and fraternité—have become prevalent in both political and social life, thereby linking state secularism to the definition of national identity (Amiraux, 2015). Yet, the meanings and implications for citizenship still need to be spelled out more thoroughly. I address the two objectives mentioned in the previous paragraphs by looking at five main elements, which correspond with the five chapters of the book. First, I study the ways in which issues of religious diversity are understood, framed and dealt with in cities in France in order to disentangle the relevance of national regulations and debates from the significance of local conditions. Second, by analysing the actor constellations that intervene in processes of urban governance, I capture the structures and networks within which state and non-state actors operate. Moreover, I show how these reflect and contribute to the definition of symbolic boundaries between accepted and excluded religious groups, practices and actors. Third, I examine the discursive dimension of governance, focusing on commonalities and differences across cities. Fourth, I analyse how policies, actors and discourses shape and “format” religion (Roy, 2013), thereby establishing normative definitions of accepted public expressions of religiosity. Finally, I examine how the urban and national levels of policymaking influence one another and how cities thereby contribute to definitions of the nation. All these analyses are relevant to understanding the situation of cities in other countries in Europe and beyond.

The governance of religious diversity in Europe The governance of religious diversity has increasingly become a topic of public concern in Europe, where societies are undergoing significant socio-cultural transformations due to immigration, globalisation and secularisation. The diversification of the religious landscape is one of the most visible and controversial

Introduction 3

changes, and has become a political priority in many states over the last 15 to 20 years. Claims made by religious minorities—Muslims, in particular—have evidenced the limitations of long-term arrangements to accommodate their practices. These issues have become even more pressing since the attacks in Paris in January and November of 2015. Scholarly attention has also shifted towards the religious dimension of international migration and efforts to accommodate religious diversity in Western Europe and North America (Casanova, 2009; Koenig, 2007b, 2009). Attempts to explain differences in how it is addressed and governed at different levels have provided interesting insights. Studies focusing on the European level of governance have highlighted converging trends in legal principles (Koenig, 2007a), with institutional arrangements to accommodate Islam, in particular, becoming more similar (Laurence, 2006), and with judicial bodies, such as the European Court of Human Rights, becoming increasingly important (De Galembert & Koenig, 2014; Fokas, 2015, 2018). Thus, while nation-state jurisdiction remains crucial, the spread of transnational human rights discourses and the increasing role of international institutions are opening up new opportunities and resources for actors mobilising around religious issues. Cross-national analyses have tested hypotheses about the mobilisation of resources by religious actors, the political opportunity structures of a country and political ideologies as factors explaining differences in religious accommodation (Soper & Fetzer, 2003). To address the shortcomings of such explanations, some authors have pointed to the role played by national patterns of church-state relations, particularly when it comes to accommodating Islam (Soper & Fetzer, 2007). Others have revised explanations based on church-state relations with analyses of configurations of national identity and type of polity (Koenig, 2005, 2007a). More recently, sub-state levels of government and state institutions have attracted the attention of scholars as a means to overcome some of the limitations of the national model approach (Beckford, 2001; Furseth, 2003; Martínez-Ariño et al., 2015). A call for more research into urban configurations of state secularism exists that stresses the need to observe practices on the ground (Bowen, 2007). In this book, I adopt the concept of governance to study such configurations and practices. Governance is understood in different ways, and there is debate around the change in emphasis from government to governance (Jordan et  al., 2005). Governance can be defined as a move from top-down government regulation to a way of policymaking and implementation in which state actors are involved and negotiate with non-state actors in order to achieve a policy goal or outcome through mechanisms of coordination (Klijn, 2008). Despite political authorities preserving a central position, the state is no longer the only actor to intervene in politics (Michel, 1998; Pinson, 2010). Moreover, governance includes not only top-down rules but also other informal and looser types of regulation that occur in more horizontal structures, such as networks and partnerships. According to Veit Bader (2007, p.  874), “religious governance refers to the internal and external regulation of religious diversity and to their dynamic

4 Introduction

interaction”. The governance of religion at different levels is also increasingly exerted through such decentralised networks of actors (Martikainen, 2013, 2016). Adopting the governance perspective promises to overcome some of the limitations of exclusively examining national legal arrangements. First, governance is a broader concept than that of government, as it allows governing processes that go beyond the formal structures and rules of the state to be captured and the role of non-state actors in decision-making and policymaking to be analysed (Giersig, 2008). Second, it allows policies using soft power (Nye, 1990, 2004) and different forms of coordination—such as network structures—and other modes of selfregulation that fall outside the contours of the law to be taken into account. The latter aspect is of particular interest. Religion is increasingly incorporated into and governed through networks in which cooperation and trust may evolve into some form of co-optation, ultimately leading to self-regulation (Burchardt, 2017; Duemmler & Nagel, 2013; Martikainen, 2013). Third, by pushing the analysis beyond rather stable church-state legal arrangements, this perspective provides access to on-going processes of defining and negotiating the religious and the secular, as well as identifying legitimation/inclusion and stigmatisation/exclusion processes resulting from governance practices. From this standpoint, then, it is possible to grasp the negotiations and power dynamics among different actors. In other words, this governance approach provides access to the entrails of secularism as it is negotiated and (re-)shaped by a range of different actors in concrete urban contexts.

Why study French cities? Arguments and contributions In this book, I make two main arguments—one empirical, the other theoretical— that contribute to debates in the sociology of religion, religious studies and migration studies about the governance of migration-driven religious diversity in contemporary democracies. The empirical argument refers to the ways in which France governs religious diversity. Despite the decentralisation policies of the 1980s and 1990s (Thoenig, 2005), France is a highly centralised country. The legal regulation of church-state relations is a competence of the central state, which means that the regulatory capacities of cities are more limited than in less-centralised countries like Germany. Therefore, one would expect national regulations to lead to very similar urban responses. Moreover, despite France being, “de facto, a multicultural society” (Wihtol de Wenden, 2003, p. 77) and the notion of Frenchness being contested, the reluctance to recognise diversity publicly remains strong. Therefore, it is relevant to analyse how the imagined national community is conceived and how that affects the ways in which cultural and religious difference is included or excluded from such an imaginary. Also, it is relevant to grasp the practical consequences of those imaginaries for urban policy creation and implementation (Barbehön et al., 2015).

Introduction 5

Relatedly, discourses on laïcité are at the core of debates about national identity and social cohesion. The 1905 law on the separation of church and state in France sets the benchmark for any other regulation affecting religion and its presence in the public sphere. Further national regulations, namely the 1959 law concerning private Catholic schools, the 2004 law banning the wearing of ostentatious religious symbols in public schools and the 2010 act banning concealment of the face in public spaces, reinforce the legal scaffolding that supports the principle of secularism. Yet, actors mobilise the notion of laïcité differently, at different moments for different purposes. It is thus necessary to unveil how different political ideas about secularism guide urban political interventions. Lastly, French cities struggle with what are often interpreted as the main threats to urban social cohesion, namely communautarisme (communalism) and radicalisation. Religious diversity is often framed as threatening urban social cohesion, too. However, it is also perceived as a means to address social exclusion, marginalisation and vivre ensemble (coexistence). These framings inform not only national security policies, but also how cities address religion. I therefore argue that, while the general legal and political arrangements of secularism at the central level of the state and the discursive framework of laïcité at the national level play a crucial role, governance of religion in France is not just a top-down, homogeneous political project. Cities do not simply monitor the implementation of and compliance with national laws and policies, they also intervene in innovative ways, which may at times reinforce and at times challenge or expand those national frameworks. Each city may promote more or less inclusive forms of state secularism and adopt more or less interventionist approaches. Moreover, while cities often adopt a problem-driven, pragmatic approach—especially in the aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks—they also contribute normative definitions of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” religiosity in the public sphere. These, which are often more inclusive than national accounts and sometimes stand at the edge of law, contribute to a discursive redefinition of laïcité and Frenchness. Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse share some developments, while at the same time also present some notable differences. Municipal authorities in all three cities address religious issues more or less actively and, in so doing, all include representatives of religious groups. In this sense, both the national Gallican tradition of state regulation and the control of religious groups (Bowen, 2012) and a trend towards governance partnerships are apparent. These cities also share the political goal of promoting social cohesion through the governance of religious diversity, something that resonates well with the discursive “mantra” of promoting vivre ensemble (Beaman, 2016). The three cities differ in the level of intervention of their municipal administration. While Rennes presents an interesting case of intense interventionism, Bordeaux, as well as Toulouse to some extent, have adopted a more laissez faire approach. Moreover, while in Rennes the emphasis and effort mostly concern regulatory and redistributive measures, in Toulouse, but more especially in

6 Introduction

Bordeaux, the focus is on symbolic policies and the “staging” of good understanding between religious leaders. The cities also differ in the discursive repertoires they mobilise to justify their approach to religion and secularism. Therefore, the discussions and decisions made in the three cities may shape how individuals and groups live their religious lives quite differently. The theoretical argument refers more generally to the role of cities in the governance of religion. The largest amount of religious diversity is concentrated in urban areas, where immigrant populations in Europe are overrepresented. In addition, it is mostly in cities where people practice their religion and where the intersections between the religious and the secular, the public and the private, crystallise. In fact, urban contexts are where citizens first encounter the state and its institutions through their urban street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1971), and are therefore also where most of the requests and conflicts over religious issues take place (Griera, 2012). The literature on the postsecular city argues that “it is in the urban that the shift from secular to postsecular in terms of public space, building use, governance and civil society is most intensively observed and experienced” (Beaumont, 2010, p. 3). However, studies of the governance of religion have often ignored cities to the benefit of national state-church arrangements. In this book, I take up the call to disaggregate the analyses and focus on how lower politico-administrative levels understand, frame and deploy state secularism. Similar to arguments made by migration scholars with reference to integration policies (Dekker et al., 2015; Poppelaars & Scholten, 2008; Schiller, 2017), I contend that it is not only central states but also cities that matter in the governance of migration-related religious diversity. Adopting an urban approach enables overcoming some limitations of the national models approach, including their static nature and inability to capture historical change properly, their homogenising portrayal of national realities, and incapacity to grasp internal variations and inconsistencies, and, finally, their normative underpinnings (Bader, 2007). Instead, a meso- and micro-sociological and ethnographic approach is better equipped to examine the negotiation of secularism on the ground and the multiple and changing meanings that actors attach to the notion of laïcité. As I have shown elsewhere (Martínez-Ariño, 2018, p. 814), the urban governance of religious diversity involves complex assemblages where 1) the political interests and claims of various unequally socially positioned actors over 2) a number of domains and objects of the public expression of religiosity 3) are subjected to a variety of municipal interventions, 4) which are shaped by the interplay of supranational legal frameworks, national legislation, policies, institutional arrangements and local contextual factors. The result of these regulation processes are particular (and often contested) normative definitions of “accepted” or “legitimate” public expressions of religiosity, subsequently enacted by a variety of local actors through both formal procedures and informal practices.

Introduction 7

These assemblages, with their changing political interests, policy interventions and actors (Nail, 2017), produce policies designed and implemented to regulate the ways in which people live and practice their religion in cities.2 Further, I contend that cities’ local circumstances, such as histories of migration, the role of political leadership, the history of interaction between majority churches and civil authorities, and urban imaginaries and narratives, influence how religion and religious diversity are perceived and discursively constructed as a social and policy problem that requires public intervention. As Barbehön et al. (2015, p.  238) put it, “the problematization of social phenomena is not independent of the specific locality”. Local conditions also shape the public policy responses that are generated in each urban context. An urban approach therefore enables comparison across different levels and among cities, thereby highlighting the influence of local conditions and identifying the channels through which different politico-administrative levels influence how the nation is constructed, contested, negotiated and redefined.

Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse: three empirical cases This study is based on empirical research in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse. Despite sharing the same national legal and political framework, as well as controversies and discourses, these cities’ responses to religion are not identical. I conduct a “contextualized comparison” (Locke & Thelen, 1998, p.  11) that is sensitive to each particular case. Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse are not exceptional cases, nor are they representatives of a particular type of city, if such a thing exists. Rather, they encapsulate their own specificities as well as trends observable throughout different localities in France and in other European countries. Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse can be considered rather similar cases. They are medium-sized cities in terms of population size and their embeddedness in economic networks, and as hubs for financial services and investment (Toulouse stands out here, given its connections to the aeronautics and space industries). Rennes is a medium-sized city and capital of the Bretagne region. Its population in 2017 was 216,815 and the total population of the metropolitan area was 447,429. Bordeaux is the capital of the Gironde region. The city’s population in 2017 was 254,436 and the total population of the metropolitan area rose to 791,958. Toulouse is the biggest of the three. Its population in 2017 was 479,553 inhabitants, a figure that rises to 771,132 when the whole metropolitan area is included.3 While none of these cities underwent intense industrialisation, and they cannot be compared to capital cities like Paris, nor to big metropolises like Lyons or Marseilles, all three are important regional centres. Studying medium-sized cities, where most Europeans live (Giffinger et al., 2007), can offer novel insights into urban processes (Bell & Jayne, 2009). Second, these cities have moderate but not insignificant percentages of foreignborn populations (all three around 15% or below in 2017), which can be used as a

8 Introduction

proxy for the extent of religious diversity.4 Once a land of emigration, Bretagne, and Rennes in particular, has become a territory receiving populations from different cultural and religious backgrounds. 24,666 of its inhabitants (11.4% of the city’s population) had been born outside France, while 20,977 (9.6%) had foreign nationality.5 In Bordeaux, 28,052 inhabitants (11%) had been born outside France, while 23,976 (9.4%) had foreign nationality. In Toulouse, these percentages are slightly higher: 72,863 of the city’s population (15.2%) had been born outside France, while 52,863 (11%) had foreign nationality. Moreover, the percentage of votes for the extreme right of the Front National in the municipal elections is rather limited (less than 10% of all votes), which can be an important factor for responses to religious diversity (Carvalho, 2016; Martínez-Ariño et  al., 2018). Moreover, civil-society networks and contacts in medium-sized cities can be expected to be denser, facilitating interaction between municipal authorities and religious organisations. Finally, unlike bigger cities like Marseilles or Paris, where religious issues have acquired a higher public profile and gained much media and academic attention in recent years, religious issues are apparently almost uncontroversial in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse. However, this does not make smaller cities uninteresting; on the contrary, they can be observatories of secularism deployed far from mediatised and conflict-laden contexts. These cities differ with regard to other aspects. First, they are ruled by different political parties. While mayors from the Parti Socialiste have governed Rennes without interruption since 1977, the conservatives, currently represented by Les Républicains, have governed Bordeaux since 1947. Toulouse, in turn, has experienced the alternation of political parties and is currently governed by the conservatives. While political orientation may certainly have an impact on cities’ responses to religious diversity, the two big political parties in France are moving closer in their understandings of laïcité (Barras, 2013). Moreover, mayors in France are powerful figures, some being more charismatic than others in their mobilisation of urban actors. The public profile of religious leaders also differs from city to city, which can affect how religious issues are addressed. The three cities also differ in their religious history. While Rennes has a long history of strong Catholic predominance and good understanding with the ruling Parti Socialiste, Bordeaux has a longer tradition of religious diversity, particularly linked to its wine industry, which was also present in municipal political life (Malogne-Fer, 2019a). Toulouse suffered a terrorist attack against a Jewish school in 2012, which marked the city’s political, social, cultural and religious life.

A methodological note I designed my research as a comparative qualitative study of three cases to gain in-depth insights into how cities in France respond to increasing religious diversity and why they do it the way they do (Yin, 1994). Between November 2015 and January 2017, I conducted fieldwork in Rennes, Bordeaux and

Introduction 9

Toulouse. In the aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and November terrorist attacks in Paris, terrorism captured the attention of my research participants, who talked with unease about certain topics and offered politically correct and socially expected responses. Moreover, Muslim actors were under a strong pressure of “hypercorrection sociale” (Sayad, 1999, p. 10) and secularist actors became prominent in public discussions. This convoluted context had a negative impact on my fieldwork and research participants. However, it also generated opportunities to observe a few informative events, such as an interfaith prayer organised in Rennes in November 2015, that would not have otherwise taken place. I interviewed 58 urban actors:6 seven politicians, 12 members of the municipal administration, 19 representatives of local religious organisations (including Islam, Judaism, mainline Protestant churches, Evangelical churches, Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism and Jehovah’s Witnesses), three members of interfaith associations, four members of secularist and humanist groups, eight members of other civil-society associations, two local journalists and three academics. To capture as broad a range of actors as possible, I did not draw up a closed list of interlocutors. While some actors were pre-defined in my research design, I obtained access to and recruited most participants through snowball sampling. This limited my contacts mostly to those who were part of established governance networks. However, I interviewed a few members of less-established groups who were excluded from those circuits of information-sharing and decision-making (Browne, 2005). I conducted all of the interviews in French,7 except for one with a native English-speaker. As a non-French researcher, I was never seen as someone with particular political interests in the issues at stake. Moreover, as a “socially acceptable incompetent” (Lofland et al., 2006, p. 69), I was in a good position to ask for details about taken-for-granted assumptions in my interlocutors’ responses. I also collected and analysed the content of policy documents, public speeches, municipalities’ websites, leaflets for various events and local associations, documents from municipal archives, minutes of the meetings of municipal councils, etc. All these documents offered detailed information that is not always possible to collect through interviews. Finally, I participated in the meetings of the Comité consultatif laïcite de Rennes, a consultative body set up by the municipality in 2015 to discuss issues related to religion and secularism. I followed its monthly meetings, where members drafted the Charte de la laïcité rennaise, and directly observed their negotiations of urban secularism. Attendance varied considerably; between 15 and 20 from the initial 39 members attended regularly. The content and structure of the meetings varied too. In most cases, the secretary would introduce the topic for discussion that month, explain how the municipality was handling things thus far and then open the floor for discussion. The aim was to capture the members’ standpoints, which would be reflected in the draft of the charter. Sporadically, an expert or bureaucrat was invited to offer insights on a particular topic, such as, for example, counter-terrorism strategies.

10 Introduction

By participating regularly in these meetings, I observed first-hand how urban actors on the ground discuss and produce secularism and discourses on laïcité. It was often in this setting that the most revealing gestures and interactions happened. Sometimes apparently innocuous comments reflected how actors thought about religious diversity, secularism and the nation. As Maria Schiller (2016, p. 15) states, “[b]y only conducting interviews, one misses the more tacit knowledge and practices of urban officials [and other urban actors] and the meanings local policies acquire when they are being implemented”. Moreover, I was included in the committee’s mailing list, which gave me access to the documents discussed in the meetings and regular announcements. I complemented these ethnographic observations with observations in cemeteries, streets and squares, places of worship, exhibitions and commemorative events, which enabled me to observe how policies materialise in urban spaces and grasp the ambience during that period.

The structure of the book The five chapters of this book approach the key components of urban governance of religious diversity, namely policy instruments, actor constellations, discourses and narratives, definitions of legitimate public expressions of religiosity, and interactions between the urban and national levels of regulation. In the Conclusion chapter, I highlight the key theoretical and methodological implications of my findings that move our sociological understanding of the matter forward. Chapter 1 examines urban governance of religious diversity through its policy interventions. Drawing on the concepts of governance and public policy instruments, I analyse the format and content of such measures by comparing across cities. I also identify and examine the specific local conditions that explain specific configurations of urban secularism, which I present in a typology. This shows the variety of ways in which religion is dealt with within the contours of the nation state and highlights the importance of examining the local context. Chapter 2 focuses on the actor constellations involved in urban governance. In it, I show that governance happens in the interaction between urban politicians and public officials, religious groups, secularist actors and a variety of other civil-society organisations. This produces boundaries between actors considered legitimate and illegitimate, which reinforces processes of inclusion and exclusion, especially among religious minorities. I then discuss the role that religious actors play as minority advocates when they are incorporated and sometimes co-opted by state actors. Finally, I explore how different actors represent themselves and perceive their roles as governance partners. Chapter 3 draws on the concept of “urban myths of conviviality”, coined by Alexander K. Nagel (2018), to examine recurring discourses and narratives about religious diversity, state secularism and social cohesion through discourse analysis. I argue that the discourse of vivre ensemble, or living together, serves as both

Introduction 11

praise of the situation in each individual city and as a justificatory repertoire for the policy measures or lack thereof. Moreover, I show that while the discourses are similar across cities, they are inspired by different local historical references. I also introduce the notion of “spectre of social rupture” to refer to the discourses around communalism as a threat to social cohesion that serve to discipline certain populations. Chapter 4 examines the normative definitions of “acceptable” public religiosity that emerge from urban governance, inspired by James Beckford’s (1999) notion of “religious boundary disputes”. Drawing heavily on ethnographic data, I unpack what religious “normality” looks like and the discursive frameworks that underlie such definitions. I show that examples of more restrictive secularism coexist with more inclusive understandings of acceptable public religiosity. Lastly, I discuss how these normative definitions feed back into general understandings of laïcité and belonging to the nation. Chapter 5 focuses on the dynamics between the urban and national levels in the governance of religious diversity. It shows how regulations, policies, controversies and discourses at both levels permeate and influence one another. More specifically it identifies seven channels or mechanisms through which this interaction takes place, which include formal institutions, personal interactions and city networks, among others. I conclude by discussing the theoretical and methodological implications of the findings of my research. I argue for the specificity of urban secularism and the need to study it as something distinct. I also discuss the dichotomies that are produced and reproduced in governance processes and the implications they have for a politics of inclusion and exclusion. Finally, I advocate for an approach to secularism and related matters as something in the making and speculate how they might look like in the years to come.

Notes 1 Politicians and the general public often consider laïcité the fourth pillar of the Republic (Fassin, 2015). 2 See Koster (2015) for a similar use of the notion of assemblages in the policy field of social housing. 3 Data gathered by the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) for the year 2017. https://insee.fr/ 4 Official data on religious affiliation does not exist in France. 5 Data gathered by the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) for the year 2017. The data of those born outside of France only includes those people who are 15 years and older. 6 In order to grant the anonymity of my research participants, I have neither used real names nor disclose the specific position they occupy or organisation they represent. I have only referred to the real name or position of a person in the case of statements made public in the media and where the stance of an actor (usually a politician) is well known by the public. In the rest of the cases, I use more vague expressions, e.g., “a Muslim

12 Introduction representative in Rennes” or “a member of a secularist association in Bordeaux”, which do not compromise the anonymity of participants who are not in the public eye. 7 All interview excerpts and quotations from any document or discussion that I present in the book are my own translation from the original in French. In some cases, slight language adjustments have been made to make the quotation understandable in English.

Chapter 1

Municipal policy instruments regulating religious diversity

Religious diversity is a characteristic of European cities, where minorities are becoming more and more visible alongside the legacies of the historical Christian churches (Becci et al., 2016). Moreover, cities are where religious organisations first meet the state and make their claims for the recognition of their rights and the accommodation of their practices (Frégosi & Willaime, 2001). City authorities are faced with new demands that require intervention, such as the need for space to build places of worship. However, other issues, such as the regulation of religious practice during the workday for city employees, the arrangement of school menus, the use of public space for religious celebrations and the participation of urban authorities in those events have also received increasing attention. In this chapter, I show how cities not only implement national legal frameworks and policies in addressing these challenges, but also enjoy room for manoeuvres to design and implement their own policies. I argue that cities are spaces where the active governance of religious diversity by a variety of urban actors is accomplished through formal and informal, as well as direct and indirect, means. These processes of negotiation, persuasion and coercion result in specific normative definitions of what constitutes acceptable and legitimate expressions of religiosity. This chapter examines the wide range of interventions that cities in France have adopted to respond to religious diversity. As indicated by several authors, “French secularism is much more complex than the legal understanding of it” (Ivanescu, 2016, p. 142). Thus, one must examine how the notion of laïcité unfolds in concrete contexts. I pay particular attention to soft policies, which do not imply any legal sanction but nonetheless have the capacity to change behaviour. This chapter presents the different measures, some innovative, some derivative, that urban authorities have implemented in cooperation with religious organisations and other urban actors, such as secularist and neighbourhood associations. To analyse their underlying rationale, as well as the content and forms of regulation they entail, I adopt the concept of public policy instruments. The specific conditions of each context, such as the history of relations between political authorities and the Catholic Church, the weight of the ideas of charismatic mayors and religious authorities, and the impact of terrorist attacks, influence the format and content of such policy instruments. Rennes, for example, has

14  Municipal policy instruments

adopted a more interventionist approach and Bordeaux a more laissez faire and less proactive one, while Toulouse stands between the two. Moreover, while Bordeaux, and Toulouse, to some extent, approach religious groups for their religious character, Rennes has adopted an approach that focalises more on their character as other civil-society organisations. At the end of the chapter, I propose a typology of patterns of the urban governance of religious diversity.

Policy instruments and networks in urban governance Public policy instruments are both “technical and social” devices meant to organise relations between the state and its various constituencies (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007; Le Galès, 2007). As technologies of power that condense “knowledge about social control and ways of exercising it”, policy instruments are not neutral (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007, p.  3). They impose a definition of the problem and specify the solutions to address it. As this chapter shows, urban authorities define the regulation of religious diversity as an issue that requires the intervention of different types of actors, not exclusively the state. Moreover, by selecting the issues to be addressed through these instruments, urban actors already establish which public religious behaviours require regulation. Public policy instruments can take the shape of “hard law”, which are binding and implying sanctions. They can also be “soft policies”, which do not carry legal penalties (Beveridge, 2012) but can impose social costs, usually in terms of reputation (Rhodes & Visser, 2011). Soft policies are based on the exercise of “soft power” and tend to be used to address contested policy issues. They distribute responsibilities and obligations and encourage self-regulation and self-policing by co-opting the parties involved (Crawford, 2003). In the governance of religious diversity, the use of soft power, understood as the capacity to achieve certain political objectives through persuasion and not coercion (Nye, 2004), has been extensively documented (Griera et al., 2014). Seduction is the basis for achieving a change in the policy preferences of others and gaining their support. Soft power instruments include networks, agreements and projects, which usually bring together a variety of urban actors with a common goal, such as promoting peaceful religious coexistence. The governance of religious diversity, then, can happen through a variety of mechanisms that operate both within the religious field itself (self-regulation) and outside it (governance structures, such as consultative committees, and soft-power policies, such as subsidies). Traditional patterns of church-state relations are thus no longer the exclusive mechanisms for the regulation of religion, particularly in diverse societies (Martikainen, 2013). The questions, then, are whether cities intervene proactively in the regulation of religious diversity and, if so, to what extent this happens through governance processes and structures, rather than solely through traditional top-down government

Municipal policy instruments 15

interventions. What types of instruments are used, how do they problematise certain religious issues, and what do they tell us about the role and position assigned to different actors in urban governance? Do we observe differences across cities in the style of and measures for the governance of religious diversity and, if so, what are the specific contextual factors that underlie such particularities? Although cities have the capacity to intervene in the governance and regulation of religious diversity with a wide variety and quantity of policy instruments, my research shows that some opt for a more interventionist approach, while others take a more laissez faire stance.

Realms and types of intervention Urban policies dealing with religious diversity encompass different realms of regulation. Some focus on place while others focus on people (Scott & Storper, 2015). The former cover a great variety of objects of regulation, such as the use of public space for religious, secularist or atheist purposes; the construction of places of worship as well as looser architectural interventions; the arrangement of religious cemeteries or confessional plots in public cemeteries; the use of municipal facilities for religious purposes and celebrations; the display of religious and secularist signs in urban public spaces; the organisation of interfaith or laïcité tours through the city; and the presence of religious symbols in municipal facilities. The latter, focused on people, comprise a diverse range of domains of regulation, including the wearing of religious symbols in public, the behaviour of municipal employees, the provision of food in school canteens, extracurricular activities in schools, the participation of politicians and city officials in (inter-)religious activities, the invitation of religious representatives to civil celebrations and commemorations, the conduct of religious festivities, access to municipal subsidies for religious and cultural activities, and the official registration of religious organisations at the municipal level. Policies can take different shapes. I have classified urban interventions related to religion into four main groups (Martínez-Ariño, 2018): municipal regulatory documents, policies related to the allocation of material resources to religious diversity issues and religious organisations, policies in the realm of the symbolic recognition of religious diversity, and interventions aimed at promoting the political participation of religious groups in politics and policymaking. The production of regulatory documents by urban authorities, such as ordinances, decrees and charters, as well as internal regulations for the functioning of the administration and codes of conduct for municipal employees, is the most formal way of regulating religious issues. Such documents do not necessarily ban religious practices; they can also set the limits and guidelines. Some may be problem-specific, such as the burkini ban in 2016—referred to at the beginning of the book—while others might cover a wider range of domains, such as civility ordinances that lump religious practices with other “deviant” behaviours.

16  Municipal policy instruments

The second group of policies are those allocating material resources to religious diversity issues and local religious organisations. These can be considered the more concrete interventions, as they relate to the provision of financial and spatial resources. This group encompasses a variety of policies, including those related to urban planning and construction permits for places of worship, the allocation of land for such buildings, the provision of space for confessional plots in municipal cemeteries and allocation of public funds to subsidise the construction, renovation and maintenance of places of worship and cemeteries. There are also more indirect measures, such as the provision of municipal facilities for religious purposes at zero cost and the funding of programs that promote laïcité, interreligious dialogue and the cultural activities of religious groups. Third, symbolic policies may be implemented to appease public concerns without necessarily addressing the underlying problems (Edelman, 1988). Such measures can fulfil a variety of functions, among which is confirming that action is being taken, educating the public on a certain issue, or playing a role in moral education that “delineates between behaviour that is deemed acceptable and that which is not” (Stolz, 1983, p. 480). Symbolic policies use terms and slogans, banners, pictures, gestures, ritual acts and political staging strategically in order to meet certain social requirements (Sarcinelli, 2008). For example, recognising the role of religious groups in the city or providing examples of good understanding between religions can be highly effective. Visibility is a key political issue that can lead to both recognition and control (Brighenti, 2007). By becoming more visible in the public sphere, religious groups come under pressure to account for their actions and fulfil the required moral standards. More visibility may thus well turn into a duty of “social hypercorrectness” (Sayad, 1999). The notion of performance is also relevant here. Policies that offer a particular representation of religious diversity or that perform a particular understanding of living together, for example, also fall within the category of symbolic policies. The use of ceremonial aspects to grant visibility and recognition to a certain display of the “good” religion while simultaneously making the “non-legitimate” religion invisible is key. A variety of examples of symbolic policies are to be found in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse. The fourth group of policies encompasses measures fostering the political participation of religious groups. The latter have been brought back to the frontline of public life (Davie, 2015; Dinham & Lowndes, 2008; Giorgi & Itçaina, 2016). This can also happen in the realm of politics and policymaking, particularly in the context of governance, where non-state actors, such as civil-society associations (i.e., NGOs, neighbourhood associations and secularist groups), religious organisations and local businesses are included via membership in urban consultative bodies and public-private partnerships and contracts. In the next section, I present the main policies I identified in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse. Conducting ethnographic fieldwork allowed me to study “laïcité in the making” as an on-going process of negotiation between actors that takes place

Municipal policy instruments 17

in the everyday life of cities, rather than being imposed by a static regulatory framework. As one of my research participants put it, by looking at the different “déclinaisons de la laïcité au quotidien”—that is, the daily declinations of state secularism in France—I am able to identify concrete examples of the ways in which religion is negotiated and regulated on the ground.

The governance of religious diversity in French localities Rennes: an interventionist approach Rennes is a medium-sized city and capital of the region of Bretagne. Once a land of emigration, it has become a city enriched by diverse populations from different cultural and religious backgrounds. Rennes did not undergo an intense process of industrialisation, but in the last decades of the 20th century developed strongly around a cluster of economic sectors that included technology, higher education and research, health and regional government. The municipal administration has proceeded in a “forward-looking” manner, always with a strong public interventionist character and a political leadership linked to the figure of the mayor (Le Galès, 2001; Vion & Le Galès, 1998). Rennes has a long tradition of Christian democracy, and of progressive Christian organisations influencing municipal politics (Le Galès, 1993). The strong presence of the Catholic Church in the public sphere and its good and “peaceful” relationship with urban elites are crucial factors in understanding the stance of the city government towards religious minorities today. Also, the selfconception of Bretagne as a terre d’accueil (land of welcome) open towards “the other”, as some of my interviewees and the touristic slogan of the region stated, provides a justification for the urban policies of religious diversity found there. For more than three decades now, Rennes has adopted a distinctive approach to the governance of religious diversity that we may call a “laïcité interventioniste” (Willaime, 2001, p. 357). Although many illustrative examples can be drawn from public policies, it is not isolated measures but rather a more comprehensive approach that characterises this city. Although my research focuses on the current situation, an interventionist approach was already being practised in the last quarter of the 20th century. This was partly due to a charismatic mayor, Edmond Hervé, for whom [w]hen one as a mayor has the responsibility for a city, one needs to promote a [form of] living together that allows each person to express his- or herself, to be free and to feel they belong to the community. This notion of living together is something very important to a mayor. .  .  . The stance that we adopted is the following: I am the representative of the population of Rennes, a population that is present in different religious thinking. So, I decided to go at least once a year to the different religious places of worship.

18  Municipal policy instruments

Policies providing material resources to religious groups The city of Rennes implements a number of policies that provide religious groups with material resources, be they financial, spatial or logistic. The most salient and visible have to do with the construction of places of worship. The municipality’s maintenance of buildings belonging to the Catholic Church which are classified as “historical monuments” is regulated by the 1905 law. Municipalities became the owners of the church buildings built before that year which the Catholic Church did not claim in its rejection to the legal requirement to become an association cultuelle (religious association). This, of course, mostly benefits the Catholic Church, since the places of worship of the religious minorities are, generally, more recent. However, in an attempt to compensate for this structural inequality while also complying with the law, which recognises the right to practice one’s own religion, in the 1980s the city of Rennes established a policy to construct places of worship for religious minorities, even though those were presented as centres culturels (cultural centres) and not as centres cultuels (religious places). In the words of one city official, “cities can try to find ways to correct the inequality of treatment and at the same time allow people to live their religion, to celebrate services according to their religion”. In 1980, city authorities—and in particular the mayor of the Parti Socialiste at that time—initiated a policy of supporting the Muslim populations originating from migrations to the region. Following the demands of the growing Muslim community, who mostly came from Morocco and Algeria, the plenary of the municipal council adopted the decision to build the Centre Culturel Islamique du Blosne (Blosne Islamic Cultural Centre). Construction work began in 1982, and the centre was inaugurated the following year. Next to spaces for cultural activities, the centre also contains a prayer room, and religious celebrations and Friday prayers are held there regularly. However, the contract with the city required that the building should also be used for cultural purposes addressed to the general public, such as the celebration of conferences, festivities, Arabic language courses, and the promotion of intercultural dialogue and citizen participation. This decision was highly contested at both the social and political levels. As the former mayor told me, a neighbours’ association was created to fight the construction of this centre, arguing that it would have a negative impact on property values1 and that it would attract other Muslims living in France. The departmental federation of the Communist Party in Ille-et-Vilaine, of which Rennes is the capital, also initially contested the measure. Ultimately, however, after militants had criticised the party’s position, it voted in favour in the municipal council meeting of 28 April 1980.2 A Catholic cardinal intervened in support of the municipal government then to pacify the situation.3 The virulent debates of the 1980s contrast with the rather uncontested construction of a second Islamic cultural centre, approved in 2003 with the unanimous support of the municipal council and with no social opposition in the street. The fact that the previous Islamic cultural centre had not led to the expected negative

Municipal policy instruments 19

consequences seems to be the reason for that. More recently, however, two new Islamic places of worship are being constructed or planned privately, and doubts are reappearing. While in one of these two cases there seems not to be too much controversy, in the second case, concerns have been raised by a neighbours’ association about parking restrictions and consequent traffic congestion. At the moment of writing this chapter, the municipality, the neighbourhood association and the Islamic association are negotiating. One option is that the Friday prayer and big celebrations take place in a sports hall rented out by the municipality.4 As Claire De Galembert (2006) has rightly put it, the construction of places of worship by the municipal administration has to be understood as a resource that grants legitimacy to politicians and allows them access to otherwise difficult-toreach populations. In this sense, owning the places of worship, in particular those of Muslim communities, is an instrument of oversight. The contracts between religious organisations and the municipal government already establish certain criteria concerning the types of activities that can take place in such spaces and the target groups of those activities. Municipal authorities join the management boards of these centres and thereby get to influence their decisions. As a result, these buildings become more open to public scrutiny, and therefore more susceptible to surveillance and control (Brighenti, 2007). To meet the space needs of the growing Muslim community, the municipality also rents facilities for the main religious celebrations, namely Ramadan and Aïd el Kebir. Additionally, in order to manage Friday prayers, the city decided to allocate the use of a sports hall on Fridays between 12:00 and 14:00 after the payment of a fee. The city of Rennes has also funded centres for other minority religious groups. The Centre Culturel Bouddhique de Rennes (Rennes Buddhist Cultural Centre) opened its doors in 2011 and was officially inaugurated in March 2012. It was built in response to a request made in 2006 by the Buddhist community. As in the case of the Islamic centres, the emphasis in the contract is on non-religious activities, namely, a) the promotion of intercultural exchanges and the valorisation of Buddhist and Eastern cultures more generally, b) the promotion of tolerance and respect among citizens, c) the organisation of cultural and family activities and sports, and d) use as a resource centre for the promotion of intercultural understanding and dialogue. For this, the cultural association in charge of the centre receives a yearly subsidy of €15,000. Yet, despite this emphasis on the cultural aspects, a room for religious activities was built inside the building, and meditations are part of its regular activities. Interestingly, the intervention of the city in such a project generated changes in the internal functioning of the Buddhist community itself. According to the persons responsible for the centre, this is the first in France that has been funded by a municipality and that brings together a variety of Buddhist branches that would otherwise never be in the same centre under one roof and a common project. Thus, by way of this intervention, the municipality indirectly interfered in the religious affairs of the different Buddhist groups, who had to negotiate and find common ground.

20  Municipal policy instruments

The mainstream Protestant community, for its part, owns its own church, which was constructed in 1882 before the 1905 law was passed. Although eligible for public funding, the community decided to retain ownership. However, the municipality still contributed more than 470,000 euros between 2006 and 20075 to the renovation works needed to keep the building working. The Jewish community has also benefited from a specific arrangement with the municipality, although in this case the latter did not build a new centre. In 2000, following the unanimous approval of the city council, the community relocated from one municipal facility to another twice the size. The municipality made the new space available for 20 years under the form of an emphyteotique lease for the symbolic price of €15 per year and granted a subsidy of about €53,000 for renovation work. Discussions emphasised the cultural component of the centre. The municipality expected this to be a space for cultural activities offered to society at large, such as the organisation of public debates and conferences, and in particular the opening of the community’s library. However, beyond this “cultural” function, this space is also the place of worship of the local Jewish community. The provision of material resources to religious groups also happens in the domain of cemeteries, where the city has built two confessional plots—one for the Islamic communities and the other for the Jewish community. This is an intervention that, although not unique to Rennes, shows a commitment to the exercise of religious freedom for minorities. It navigates the margins of the 1881 law on the neutrality of cemeteries and the 1905 law, both of which banned the creation of private and separate religious cemeteries. Conversely, it is in agreement with recommendations issued by the Ministry of Interior in 2008 regarding the planning of cemeteries and confessional plots. Together with the funding of places of worship, confessional plots are a way to acknowledge the contribution of immigrant communities to the city, as well as being a pragmatic response to the need for more space for burials in accordance with religious rites. Edmond Hervé, Mayor of Rennes at the time, put it simply: I realised that in Rennes there were many Muslims who could not practice their religion in good conditions. And these Muslims are members of the Rennaise community . . . they have participated physically in the construction of the city. He continued by arguing that this acknowledgement is a kind of reparation for the pain caused to their families by French colonisation. Rennes has more recently expanded its intervention in the funerary domain. In 2016, the city owned two salles de recueillement, rooms of contemplation and remembrance, in the two main municipal cemeteries. These spaces, bare of any religious symbol but with a clear Christian configuration, with rows of benches facing the front of the room (Gilliat-Ray, 2005), were initially conceived of as rooms for the celebration of secular funeral ceremonies. Religious ceremonies were explicitly excluded from these spaces.6 However, the Comité consultatif

Municipal policy instruments 21

laïcité issued a recommendation in its final report in July 2016 to allow the celebration of religious ceremonies as well. I expand on the negotiation of this particular case in Chapter 4. The city has also allocated human and monetary resources to the internal level of the administration in order to deal with religious diversity and laïcité. It has invested a deputy mayor with the competence to establish relations with some religious groups. An administrative staff member supports his work, and a specific budget is allocated to different purposes, including subsidies for cultural associations, the maintenance of buildings and equipment, and the organisation of religious activities. The budget for 2016 allocated €60,000 to the Centre Culturel Islamique Avicennes, €15,000 to the Buddhist cultural centre and €10,000 to a number of associations working on activities promoting laïcité, intercultural exchange and living together. Moreover, there was also a budget for building maintenance amounting to €50,000, excluding the money destined for Catholic buildings, and €7,000 euros for different materials for associations. One action undertaken by this office is the tour, whereby the political and administrative representatives of the municipality in charge of relations with religious groups meet some of the religious representatives in the city. As one municipal employee explained to me, this is considered a way to establish contact with them and know their organisations and needs better. Many of these interventions are framed as cultural, something I elaborate on further in Chapter 4. One of my interviewees, a municipal employee, referred to these as “tricks” or “bypassing” solutions, and they are not peculiar to Rennes. As Carolina Ivanescu (2016) noted, in Marseilles, “culture” is used in policies as a proxy in approaching religion-related issues. The restrictions that the 1905 law imposes become evident here; yet they have not prevented municipalities from producing innovative alternatives to ensure that citizens from various backgrounds are able to exercise their religious freedom and, in particular, to practice collective celebrations. The policy of the “cultural” centres is one that politicians and public officials in Rennes are proud of, and they conceive of the city as innovative and somehow “pioneering” (Young & Connelly, 1981) in this regard. In the words of the former mayor: it is in the name of laïcité, in the name of equality, that we decided the construction of the [Islamic cultural] centre and what is remarkable is that it was decided in 1980. We decided the building of this centre and we fund the centre. This centre is built in soil that belongs to the city. And what we did for the Islamic religion we have also done for [other religions]. Symbolic policies for the recognition of religious diversity Words and symbols matter in politics (Edelman, 1971), particularly when it comes to issues of religious diversity. One obvious example from Rennes is the production of an official narrative about laïcité that reinforces an image of the city as

22  Municipal policy instruments

open to religious differences. Speeches delivered by the current mayor and other politicians over the last couple of years have recognised the variety of religious groups in the city. In her speech at the opening of the consultative body set up by the municipality on 6 February 2015 to address religious issues in the city, the mayor affirmed that: Laïcité is freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, which allows each person to believe or to not believe; which allows each person to practice, to express his/her faith, his/her doubts or his/her convictions, and always under the protection of our institutions. . . . Finally, laïcité is the guarantee of fraternity. It is not a denial of the religious fact or spirituality. Laïcité is neither indifference nor intolerance. On the contrary, it is a demand for dialogue, appeasement and harmonious coexistence. In France, this approach to laïcité is often called “laïcité d’ouverture”, “laïcité ouverte” or, in Ahmet T. Kuru’s terms, “passive secularism” (2007)—one that does not seclude the expression of religion in the private sphere. According to Jean Baubérot (2015), this kind of laïcité is mostly defended by those who oppose a restrictive version of laïcité and instead emphasise an openness towards religion in general. Jean-Paul Willaime (2005), who calls this a “laïcité de reconnaissance”, considers it to be the attitude of the French state as well. In Rennes, this stance has to be understood against the backdrop of the local contextual factors mentioned before, such as the historical prominence of the Catholic Church and the strong presence of subsidised Catholic schooling in the region. The symbolic recognition of religious diversity can also be observed in its ceremonial aspects, such as the participation of urban officials in the commemorative activities of selected religious groups, including the Catholic Church, the Jewish community and the Protestant Church.7 Participation in these events is not uncontested, especially among members of laicist circles, as I observed in the meetings of the consultative body in Rennes. Proponents invoked the term courtoisie républicaine (Republican courtesy) to justify attendance, a vague notion that seems to refer to a gesture of respect in accordance with the principles of the Republic but that really works as a veil to avoid discussing the more contested issue. Participation has been conducted with religious minorities over the last couple of years, but it has a long history in relation to the Catholic Church and can thus be understood as the result of path-dependence, whereby practices related to the majority religion are extended to religious minorities as well. According to Statham et al. (2005) and Carol and Koopmans (2013), the extension to religious minorities of rights and, I would add, practices of recognition that majority religions already enjoy in a country tends to be less controversial than claims to the “recognition of a practice for which there is no uncontested equivalent in Christianity” (Carol & Koopmans, 2013, p. 167). Another powerful gesture is the mayor’s invitation to religious leaders to attend the civic commemorations of 11 November (signing of the armistice that ended

Municipal policy instruments 23

the First World War) and 8 May (victory against the Nazis in the Second World War). The name of the archbishop no longer appears next to that of the mayor in the invitations, as it did in the past. Erasing their historical links with Catholicism is a sign of the secularisation of certain administrative practices and of state neutrality, which generates a more inclusive approach towards other religious and non-religious groups. Many other examples of soft policies are to be found locally, such as planting a tree to honour a cause, as is the practice in some German cities (Kalender, 2017). The city of Rennes collaborated with a local interreligious association in planting L’arbre de l’amitié entre les religions (an interreligious friendship tree) in front of the Prefecture. Plated initially in 1999, the tree had to be replanted twice (the last time in 2015) after strangers had cut and vandalise it. Interestingly, an umbrella organisation of secularist associations planted L’arbre de la laïcité (a secularism tree) in a public garden, in this case in front of the Palais de la Justice. Officials were present at the event to acknowledge the support of the municipal government in promoting laïcité. Although these are “small gestures” (Hannula, 2006), they carry important symbolic meaning, as shown by the fact that both trees were planted in front of buildings representing the institutions of the Republic (the judiciary and the executive powers, respectively). Thus, despite widespread ideas about its relegation to the private sphere, religion remains present, visible and relevant in the public sphere. This symbolic recognition can also take the form of educational routes. This was the idea behind the suggestion made by the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes to create a Parcours de la laïcité—a tour through the city visiting the main buildings and spaces representing laïcité. In this sense, symbolic measures generate and legitimise certain notions of what constitutes laïcité and ultimately what falls within the boundaries of the Republic and the nation. The educational intention of such tools is evident in the way the Rennes consultative body framed the recommendation to create the laïcité tour that would mirror classes in the public schools.8 The Comité Consultatif Laïcité proposes that laïcité tours are organised for adults that include informative visits to public buildings, allowing them to discover history and the sense of the Republic through the local heritage. (Comité Consultatif Laïcité, 2016, p. 19) This proposition aims at ensuring the continuous political and national (re-)socialisation of the city’s inhabitants through a historical reminder that makes laïcité central. Policies promoting the political participation of religious groups A third type of political intervention promotes the political participation of religious groups. An example is the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes, where

24  Municipal policy instruments

politicians, officials and representatives of six religious communities (Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism, Buddhism, Judaism and Orthodoxy) meet with members of NGOs, secularist groups and experts to discuss the implementation of state secularism. The main aim of this body was to draft a local charter of laïcité that would provide rules for municipal employees to follow in addressing religious issues, as well as recommendations for local associations and private companies. The recommendations of the Comité, once voted on by the local council, have consequences for users of public services and facilities, and, in particular, for religious organisations. Although it is only a consultative body without enforcement power, its aim is to regulate religious practices and access to resources and services. The Comité consultatif laïcité is part of a city-wide policy called the Fabrique citoyenne (the Citizens’ Fabric). Implemented since 2014 with the aim of encouraging citizen engagement in public matters, it promotes a more participatory vision of democracy in the city via six consultative committees. Although this is an example of dialogue from which theological discussions are, in theory, excluded, representatives of religious groups do intervene as “laïque” (secular) people, without any religious symbol that would identify them as members of a particular tradition. Thus, instead of generating new rules in a top-down manner, the city has involved a number of actors in a governance network as a way of discussing and implementing laïcité. In choosing this instrument, the government has aimed to legitimise both a policy and its implementation. Religious representatives are inducted into the city’s policy goals and act as carriers of the message to their communities. In this way, states can try “to influence the agenda-setting of religious organisations through persuasion and encouragement” (Martikainen, 2016, p. 128). The aim is self-regulation of the religious field to change the behaviour of the religious so that it fits within patterns considered to be adequate and in line with government rationalities (Burchardt, 2017). The selection of representatives for such bodies constitutes a major challenge. The mere fact of including religious groups in a public body is remarkable in itself, particularly in France, where the separation of religion and state is one of the formal foundations of the Republic. Moreover, the challenges are particularly important in the selection of those religious groups that do not have well-defined and bounded organisational structures, especially Muslims (De Galembert, 2006; Fournier, 2009). However, the issue of interlocutors and representatives of religious groups is not only a matter of tension and contestation among Islamic communities. When the office of the mayor, in all three cases in my study, decides who will be involved in consultative bodies, it defines who is a legitimate partner and who is not. I explore this matter in the next chapter. In summary, the city of Rennes has been proactive in the adoption of measures to warrant, but also control, the public presence and exercise of religion. The political and administrative authorities mostly align themselves with a politics of the recognition of religious minorities. The degree to which the city should

Municipal policy instruments 25

intervene, in particular financially, is something that divides the members of different political parties and ideological stances. Yet, the fact that there is a history of good relations with the Catholic Church means that some of the claims made by the religious minorities are perceived as extensions of the rights that the Catholic Church already enjoys, returning to the ideas offered by Statham and colleagues. The funding of places of worship through the formula of “cultural centres” is the main example of an intervention carried out to compensate for the disadvantaged position of religious minorities compared to that of the Catholic Church. Moreover, the self-perception of this territory as a welcoming land to different peoples serves to justify the recognition of minorities. Bordeaux: the role of symbolic politics Bordeaux, capital of the Gironde region, is generally considered a rather rich city, although there are also working-class neighbourhoods, despite the lack of extensive industrialisation. The historic presence of a foreign commercial bourgeoisie with large numbers of Protestants and Jews has left an imprint on the political life of the city, facilitating the development of secular liberalism and modernisation (Victoire, 2014). This relationship between urban political elites and religious minorities is reflected today in the way issues are addressed, with a strong emphasis on the relationship between the mayor and some religious leaders. Bordeaux’s approach differs from that of Rennes, with less municipal intervention in religious issues. We could situate it in an intermediate position between what Willaime (2001, p.  357) calls “une laïcité interventioniste” (interventionist secularism) and “une laïcité abstentionniste” (abstentionist secularism). Yet, a number of policies have been implemented that are worthy of attention, and relationships with religious leaders, which have a higher public profile in Bordeaux than in Rennes, are important. Bordeaux has also adopted a position in which the symbolic aspects of the governance of religious diversity are central. Policies providing material resources to religious groups The city administration of Bordeaux, like in Rennes, has instituted a deputy mayor to take responsibility for relations with religious groups and two administrative staff members. Looking at the allocation of resources for places of worship and confessional plots in municipal cemeteries in Bordeaux, the less interventionist approach can easily be appreciated. In Bordeaux, the cultural associations linked to religious groups receive less direct funding than those in Rennes. Only religious buildings built before 1905 are maintained by the city or, in the case of cathedrals, by the central state. These include mostly Catholic places of worship, but also the main temple of the Protestant Church, built in the first quarter of the 19th century, and the Protestant cemetery of the city. For the conservation of the wall surrounding the latter, which was built in 1826 and thus falls under the category of historic heritage under the 1905 law, the city allocated a subsidy of

26  Municipal policy instruments

€37,500 in 2008.9 Later, in 2013, the city council also approved another subsidy of €10,000 “for the restoration of the patrimonial graves of numerous Protestant personalities who made the grandeur of Bordeaux”.10 Thus, religious groups, in particular those that are less well-off and/or smaller, must fund their places of worship privately or find ways to collaborate with betteroff groups. This is the case, for example, for one Adventist Church, which uses a Catholic chapel that was designed from the beginning as an ecumenical chapel. After difficulties in getting permission from the municipal administration to build their own Adventist church with a capacity for its growing membership, contacts were established with representatives of the Catholic Church. Today, the Catholic congregation, the Adventist Church and another Evangelical church share this chapel. This private arrangement works as a semi-temporary solution, although at the time of the interview with the pastor, the congregation had already been using the chapel for eight years. Bordeaux’s less-interventionist approach is also visible in the fact that, unlike what happens in Rennes, some religious minorities, namely Protestants and Jews, have their own private historical cemeteries, some of which are still in use. Only recently, the metropolitan government has created Jewish and Muslim confessional plots in one of the interurban cemeteries in response to demographic pressure. This is not an exclusive policy of the city of Bordeaux, but involves other municipalities as well. Another clear sign of the less-interventionist character of the policy in Bordeaux is the almost total absence of direct financial contributions to religious groups and related cultural associations. Religious groups receive some funding for specific activities of intercultural and inter-faith dialogue, such as the meetings of the Amitié judéo-chrétienne (Jewish-Christian friendship) and the Amitié judéo-musulmane (Jewish-Muslim friendship). For instance, the Yavné Jewish centre has received an annual public subsidy for more than ten years now to support activities that are explicitly non-religious and open to the general public. The amounts of funding provided, however, are substantially lower from those allocated in Rennes. However, less direct forms of support for religious groups through contributions to their intercultural or interreligious activities, as with the Yavné Jewish cultural centre, also exist. The city administration has often allowed religious groups to use rooms in the city hall free of charge for the celebration of inter-faith meetings. Logistical support in the form of distributing invitations for specific events is another indirect form of municipal support. Symbolic policies for the recognition of religious diversity Since the beginning of the 2010s, Bordeaux has organised a series of annual interreligious conferences called Bordeaux Partage that are presided over by the mayor and constitute the city’s most visible initiative concerning religion. Religious leaders from the same religious traditions as in Rennes, but with a higher public profile,

Municipal policy instruments 27

especially in the case of the imam, participate in public discussions over topical issues, such as the role of religions in welcoming foreigners. The religious leaders themselves choose which topics to discuss. Such interventions can be understood as a public performance of the “good” religion enacted by these particular leaders. As one religious leader from the city who was not a member of the group put it, it’s a conference which is organised so that each one can talk around 5 minutes, including the mayor, and it’s also so that there is a spirit, a visual image for the city, as like the municipality takes into account this part of the population who are believers. Bordeaux Partage could also be considered a strategy to legitimise the figure of the mayor and provide him with political resources, as De Galembert (2006) has argued, as well as a resource that is ready to be mobilised in times of crises or unrest (Ivanescu, 2016). Unlike the situation in Rennes, the members of this body explicitly rejected the inclusion of non-religious groups, such as the Freemasons, who had requested to be made part of it, arguing instead for the specifically religious nature of the discussions (see Chapter 2).11 The municipality of Bordeaux, in collaboration with the religious traditions represented in Bordeaux Partage, also organises the “Day of Laïcité and Living Together”. To emphasise the demand of transparency towards society, open houses are organised in a number of places of worship. Interestingly, as one political representative told me, this day was organised in the image and likeliness of the Lange Nacht der Religionen (Long Night of Religions) in Berlin. That event, consisting of the opening of more than a hundred houses of worship to the general public, has annually taken place in Germany’s capital since 2012. In this interurban policy transfer (McCann, 2011), through which the idea and type of activities organised in Berlin serve as a model for Bordeaux, there is an interesting shift from one context to the other. Since in Bordeaux the event is celebrated in December to commemorate the passing of the 1905 law on the separation of church and state, it was deemed inappropriate to call it the “day of religions”. Using “laïcité” instead of “religions” in the title of the event was a way to avoid potential conflicts around the use of particular terms. This shows how words matter and how the vocabularies used are highly charged politically. From the perspective of public policy instruments, this example of the Journée de la laïcitié et du vivre ensemble (Day of Laïcité and Living Together) shows, on the one hand, that the city defines laïcité and religious issues as related to social cohesion and living together. On the other hand, it defines the relationship between those governing and those who are governed in such a way that religious actors are seen not only as the target of that policy, but also as active agents in the promotion of living together. Put differently, the city frames religious issues as related to social cohesion and religious groups as actors involved in its promotion. Members of the municipal government participate in religious celebrations and events of interreligious dialogue organised by the communities themselves. In

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2016, the deputy mayor in charge of relations with religious groups participated in breaking the Ramadan fast (Iftar), where he proclaimed that “fraternity is the real foundation of Islam”, adding that “Islam is an integral part of laïcité, of the Republic, from the moment that it respects the rules, like any other religion”. This official participation is a clear sign of the symbolic politics of the city government. He continued by stating that: The sense of my presence this evening, like every time that I am next to believers for important moments in their religions, is to transmit a message of support and friendship from Alain Juppé. . . . As you know, the Mayor of Bordeaux has an open view on laïcité; a conception in which each person has the right to believe or not believe; and for believers, to express one’s own religious convictions, within the limits of public order, of course. This is, by the way, exactly what the 1905 law says.12 In 2017, the Protestant churches invited the mayor to the celebrations around the centenary of Martin Luther’s rebellion. Alain Juppé, as well as other members of the municipal council, also regularly participate in the celebration of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which takes place in the synagogue. His intervention in the celebration, recognising the long-lasting relations between the Jewish community and the municipality, is perceived as a sign of the recognition of the Jewish community by the city’s political authorities. The municipality also invites the leaders of some religious organisations to public events, such as that commemorating the ending of slavery. The city hall also hosts events organised by inter-faith associations, such as the closing ceremony of the world “InterfaithTour” organised by an association called Coexister. In his opening speech, the same deputy mayor confirmed his vision of laïcité as implying only the neutrality of the state and not of individuals.13 By making this distinction between the legally required neutrality of the state and the politically and socially required neutrality of individual citizens, he was distancing the position of the city government from national public and political discourses aimed at restricting individual expressions of religiosity in public. Policies promoting the political participation of religious groups In contrast to Rennes, Bordeaux intervenes much less in the regulation of religious issues. However, this does not mean that there is no interaction with the civil authorities. On the contrary, regular contacts occur in both institutional and informal settings. While no consultative body exists to influence urban policies in the manner of the Comité consultatif laïcité in Rennes, there are other ways in which the interests of religious groups can be voiced. Bordeaux has a long tradition of the two oldest minorities, Protestants and Jews, being represented on the city council or serving as councillors and mayors (Pacteau de Luze, 2007; Ruiz, 1997).14 This kind of relationship with the city

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government is very specific to Bordeaux (Malogne-Fer, 2019a); it highlights the variety of ways in which the secular French state can interact with religious groups. In my interviews, this informal arrangement only appeared implicitly when references were made to the presence of a Jewish municipal councillor. The city relies on religious groups for activities that promote the principle of vivre ensemble, well aware of the long local tradition of interreligious dialogue. For example, the deputy mayor in charge of equality and citizenship draws on the resources of groups such as the Jewish cultural centre to organise activities within the two-week citywide event on equality (Quinzaine de l’égalité, de la diversité et de la citoyonneté). This approach is made from the perspective of non-discrimination and the principle of living together. It is not his relations with the religious groups as such that occupies his work. He sees these religious representatives as the carriers of particular messages, both to their own communities and to society at large. Thus, like Rennes, the municipality draws on non-state actors to govern issues of religious diversity, however, with less presence of members of non-religious groups. The cooperation with religious groups is partly to be understood as the result of the long tradition of interreligious dialogue in the city. Toulouse: the emphasis on fraternité Toulouse, the largest of the three cities in this study, is characterised by its research and industry related to informatics, aeronautics and electronics (Grossetti, 2004; Scott & Zuliani, 2007). A terrorist attack on a Jewish school in 2012 affected its response to issues of religious diversity. The fact that a local resident attacked his fellow residents sparked fears of conflict between Jewish and Muslim neighbours. By no coincidence, the emphasis on a discourse of “fraternity” in many of the documents, events and networks is one distinctive trait of the city’s current approach to religious diversity. This is something that appears very clearly in the following quotation by one of the local Jewish representatives: On 19 March 2012, Toulouse was strongly impacted by what happened, the Jewish community in the first place, but the city of Toulouse too, because no one could have thought that a Toulousain could have done what was done. . . . So, Toulouse in the first place has been impacted and has wanted to react, and I think that the municipality is very committed to “living together” or to “doing together” with the aim of creating peace, respect for laïcité and the possibility for each of the big religions to live in peace and calm and without interfering with one another. The promotion of laïcité, intercultural and interreligious dialogue, mutual recognition and the accompaniment of municipal employees when dealing with issues related to religion and the principle of laïcité is one of four transversal axes (next to youth, the fight against discrimination and gender equality) of the Contrat de

30  Municipal policy instruments

ville de Toulouse Métropole 2015–2020 (Urban Contract Toulouse Métropole 2015–2020). This document, which guides the general policy of the city in respect of the development of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods and the fostering of urban cohesion, is but one example of how religion becomes visible in governance. Policies providing material resources to religious groups Although Toulouse has adopted a less interventionist approach than Rennes, there are signs of the institutionalisation of religious issues as a specific policy field. This is evident in the allocation of material and human resources to deal with religious issues and the promotion of the principle of laïcité. As in the other two cities, there is a deputy mayor in charge of relations with religious groups. Moreover, this person is supported by the work of an appointed position as chargé de mission, who acts as the secretary of a consultative body, Toulouse Fraternité, which I will discuss shortly. The city has also invested resources in the construction of what it calls the Espace Diversités Laïcité (Diversities Laïcité Space). This four-storey building, where the Égalité diversités (Equality diversities) service of the city of Toulouse is located, is mostly dedicated to the fight against discrimination and contains spaces for exhibitions, as well as housing the city’s LGBT centre. Within this service, religion is included as an axis of discrimination, alongside other forms of diversity such as gender and disability. Moreover, this space offers a location for debates and conferences around laïcité, which is emphasised more than religion. The issue of the lack of places for religious groups, in particular Muslims, and the need for mosques to be constructed is widespread across cities in France, Europe and beyond (Cesari, 2005b, 2005a; Maussen, 2007; Zwilling, 2015). This is also the case in Toulouse, where a large mosque (Mosquée Mirail Toulouse) has been under construction since 2013, with the city providing temporary worship space. However, the whole mosque project is being financed with private donations, which contrasts with the first two Islamic centres built in Rennes, but resembles the approach of Bordeaux. As I have shown in the cases of Rennes and Bordeaux, the creation of confessional plots in municipal cemeteries is a key intervention that municipal and metropolitan authorities can carry out. In Toulouse, the existence of Protestant and Jewish cemeteries dates back in time to when the first plots were created at the beginning of the 19th century.15 More recently, Toulouse has accommodated the needs of religious minorities to access confessional plots. During the 1980s, the city constructed an Islamic and an “Asian” plot, the latter dedicated mostly to Buddhists, in the municipal cemetery (Bonnet, 2008). Some years later, two more Islamic plots were built in other cemeteries. In 2006 an additional plot was created for liberal Jews, a separation that has also been made in other cities in Europe (Martínez-Ariño, 2011). Moreover, as a representative of the Orthodox Church told me, they, too, had been requesting a plot in one of the metropolitan cemeteries

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since 2016, and the community was waiting for an official response at the moment of our interview in 2017. Symbolic policies for the recognition of religious diversity In Toulouse, religious groups themselves often initiate activities, sometimes in response to the demands of the state authorities (the Prefecture, for example) in order to show publicly that they can work together. In March 2015, only two months after the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, the representatives of the main religious groups in Toulouse signed the Charte de la fraternité (Charter of Fraternity) in the presence of the Minister of the Interior. The aim was to demonstrate their willingness to promote peace and fraternity and to fight discrimination. The document sends a message of understanding among religious groups and contains references to the Republican device of “liberté, égalité, fraternité”—the principle of laïcité and the national community. The decision to sign such a document has a particularly strong symbolic meaning in a city that has been affected by a terrorist attack, and it cannot be understood without reference to this particular local context. My research participants repeatedly mentioned the 2012 attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse when I asked them about religious diversity and interreligious relations in the city. Another example of this kind of policy is the Semaine de la fraternité (Week of Fraternity). This event, organised by the seven major religious groups in the city, consists of opening one place of worship of each of these traditions on each day of that week to the general population. The prefecture and the municipality contribute by providing logistics and publicising the events. The civil authorities also respond to the religious groups’ invitations to attend the event, which they regard as a way to show that there is understanding between religions. The presence of the public authorities, including members of the municipal government, gives these events legitimacy and demonstrates the close cooperation that takes place in promoting living together. It also shows that bottom-up initiatives are supported, and sometimes co-opted, by the public authorities. Policies promoting the political participation of religious groups In 2013, the Toulouse city council approved the creation of a consultative body, similar to that of Rennes, called the Conseil de la laïcité. However, the local conditions for its establishment where rather different. After the terrorist attack of 2012, the city administration felt the urge to react immediately and with determination. On 24 May 2013, the plenary of the municipal council approved the proposal to create the body. The aim of this policy instrument was manifold: to open a space for dialogue in the city that permitted different people to come together and fight communalism,16 to advise the municipality in issues related to religious diversity and vivre ensemble, and to promote and defend laïcité in the city and the interaction and exchange between different religious groups. Although setting up

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the body was framed as part of a broader political discourse about the promotion of the principle of laïcité, it was clearly a move that responded to the specific situation generated by the attack. Thereafter, a change in the colour of municipal government in 2014 meant the establishment of a new consultative body with the approval of the municipal council in December of that year. This change did not take place without opposition from the previous mayor and the representatives of the local factions of the opposition parties, who criticised the “confessional turn” in the body’s orientation. The name was therefore changed to Toulouse Fraternité—Conseil de la laïcité with the aim of emphasising the “fraternity” aspect. Critics argued that the new body focused on interreligious dialogue rather on the exclusive promotion of laïcité, freedom of thought and the neutrality of state institutions. According to a public statement made by the opposition, “laïcité is not the organisation of the coexistence of religions” in the same sense as interreligious dialogue.17 As in the case of Rennes, the first aim of this dialogue body is to discuss and give advice to the mayor on issues related to religious diversity and living together that fall within the competences of the municipal administration.18 Toulouse Fraternité is viewed by one of its forefathers as “a setting that reunites believers and non-believers in order to achieve a consensus through laïcité and the Republican values of the country”. As in the case of Rennes, but unlike the equivalent body in Bordeaux, Toulouse Fraternité also incorporates non-religious actors; in particular, secular civil-society organisations, such as NGOs. Beyond its more explicitly stated aims, the establishment of Toulouse Fraternité also responded to the desire to ease the tensions that surround Muslims in France that intensified after the Charlie Hebdo and November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. One of the main tasks of this body is to work with schools and high schools to transfer the messages of peace, friendship between religions and the need to preserve democracy to pupils. Moreover, like in Rennes, it is consulted regularly by the municipal government in order to give advice on specific issues, such as the renting of municipal facilities to religious groups and the issuing of menus in school canteens. As a concrete example, this body voted unanimously to change the menus for the 2015/2016 school year in order to include the option of a menu without meat. During 2016 and 2017, the committee examined and debated issues related to the use of public spaces and municipal facilities, the aim being to produce a document with recommendations for employees of both the municipal and the metropolitan administrations. In March 2017, this body gave the go-ahead to a municipal policy of charging fees to rent facilities to religious groups. Next to this, the city had planned to offer trainings on laïcité to municipal employees. As in the other cases shown here, this consultative body plays a larger role that goes beyond its explicit focus on the discussion and negotiation of religious issues. It also serves as a platform and resource to approach “intractable policy controversies” (Schon & Rein, 1995), such as poverty, drug-dealing and access to marginalised neighbourhoods. In other words, it is a resource that can be mobilised for a variety of policy issues beyond the domain of state secularism.

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Typology of urban governance patterns The previous section has shown how cities in France respond differently to religious diversity. In all three cities, Islam and Muslims are considered to be the main challenges. Religious issues are significant and cannot be ignored in the eyes of the public authorities (Turner, 2007), and all three cities have implemented policies of different types and in different domains to address the religious issues that are perceived and construed as policy problems. Urban authorities no longer work in isolation, but reach out instead to non-state actors to build governance networks capable of capitalising on different sources of expertise and resources. As I show in the next chapter, religious actors thus become not only objects of regulation but also instruments, resources and agents of governance. Table 1.1 summarises this. Yet, as I have shown, the degree of intervention by different actors, in particular municipal authorities, differs. The level of institutionalisation of the policy field also varies across cities. This is evident in the amount of financial and human resources allocated to it, among other things. Also, the approach adopted to religion more broadly and the nature of the engagement of religious actors is not always the same. Drawing on the three cases, I propose a typology (see Figure 1.1) of patterns in the urban governance of religious diversity that is articulated around two axes: 1) level of municipal intervention to regulate the religious field, and 2) nature of the mobilisation of religion and religious actors. Although stemming directly from my research in France, this analytical instrument should be useful in studying the governance of religious diversity in cities in other countries. The first axis in this typology refers to the level of intervention of the municipal government and administration from strong intervention and control on the one Table 1.1  Comparison of the three consultative bodies  

Actors

Rationale/motivations

Outcomes for policymaking

RennesLaïcité (interventionist)

Broad range of actors (religious and secular) Limited to state and religious representatives

Drafting charter of laïcité Giving advice to municipal government Showcasing mutual understanding and good relations A resource to mobilise in crisis situations Preventing local conflicts after terrorist attack Giving advice to the mayor

Strongly regulatory

BordeauxPartage (laissez-faire) ToulouseFraternité (intermediate)

Broad range of actors (religious and secular)

No direct outcome for policymaking Advice on request; not strongly regulatory

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Strong municipal intervention Interventionist-non-religionist

Interventionist-religionist

Rennes

Toulouse Religious groups mobilised as secular actors

Bordeaux

Laissez faire-non-religionist

Religious groups mobilised for their confessional character

Laissez faire-religionist Weak municipal intervention

Figure 1.1  Typology of urban governance patterns

hand to no intervention at all on the other. At the interventionist extreme, administrative bodies are created to explicitly regulate religious diversity, municipal registers of religious organisations exist, and policies are designed and implemented that regulate most aspects of the public presence of religiosity in cities, ranging from the construction of places of worship to the use of personal religious symbols in public spaces, the celebration of festivities, access to religiously prescribed food and so on. This, however, does not mean that a strong interventionist approach is necessarily more prone to either allowing or restricting religious expressions in public. There can be interventionist approaches in both directions. At the other extreme, municipal authorities are minimally involved in regulating any aspect of religion and thus intervene less in such matters. This could mean that there is more leeway for religious identities and practices to be expressed in the public sphere, but it could also mean that the conditions in which religious groups can exercise their right to religious freedom are more dependent upon their specific resources and capacities. In the cases of the three cities in my study, Rennes would clearly be much closer to the interventionist pole, while the other two would occupy more intermediate positions. The second axis in this typology refers to the perspective from which governance approaches religious groups. The one extreme is that which prioritises and draws on the confessional character and religious resources of religious groups,

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while at the other extreme there are approaches that mobilise religious actors in their secular capacities. An example of the first would be the conference series Bordeaux Partage, where religious authorities are invited to participate as such, without expecting them to leave their confessional character aside. The religious stance of each group on selected topical issues is the object of such discussions, which aim to encourage interreligious dialogue. The presence of non-religious groups, such as Freemasons, atheists and agnostics, has been rejected.19 The second perspective is best exemplified by the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes, where the representatives—not necessarily religious leaders—of religious groups are not expected to talk from a confessional perspective, but rather as experts and “laïque” persons concerned with particular public issues that may relate to their own religious traditions. It is then not framed as a setting of interreligious dialogue but rather as a secular dialogue from which theological discussions are, in theory, excluded. Formally and officially, faith does not form part of the committee’s discussions. Thus, while at the first extreme religions are mobilised for their confessional nature, the other extreme privileges a more “secular” mobilisation of their resources and knowledge. Needless to say, while the approach of one city may be coherent throughout a range of issues and domains of intervention, internal inconsistences may also be found.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown that urban policies for the governance of religious diversity exist in all three cities either in institutionalised forms or as informal arrangements and practices. These include regulatory documents, symbolic measures for the recognition of religious diversity, provision of material resources, and promotion of the involvement and participation of religious groups in urban policymaking. Moreover, the analysis shows that the state does not exclusively rely on its structures and agents, but instead draws on networks of non-state actors. In all three cities, religious issues and the promotion of laïcité as a core political principle are part of the municipal agenda. Moreover, the authorities draw to a greater or lesser extent on notions of culture and heritage to justify some of their interventions, which could otherwise be perceived as contravening some of the constraints imposed by the 1905 law. This framing strategy is not exclusive to France. As other authors have shown, it is quite a common trend in other countries, too. However, the functions that a culture or heritage discourse play change from context to context and from moment to moment. In the case of the three cities in my study, officials used such a discourse to justify supporting religious groups without violating the law. I elaborate on this further in Chapter 4. Yet, there are also differences in the ways these cities regulate religion and religious diversity. They differ in the degree of intervention and in their approach to religious actors. As I have shown, Rennes adopts a more interventionist approach, while in Bordeaux and Toulouse the approach is less proactive. The Rennes approach does not differ much from the historical arrangements characteristic

36  Municipal policy instruments

of France’s Gallican tradition, where the Catholic Church was controlled by the state (Bowen, 2012). Moreover, I have also shown that while in some cases religious groups are viewed from the perspective of their confessional nature, in other cases their confessional nature is left aside and they are considered to be one more among other civil-society actors. This may have implications for their input, power and legitimacy in the policymaking process. Moreover, we also see that policies in one city do not necessarily follow a completely coherent approach, since they have been adopted at different times by successive governments. Thus, a policy instrument that recognises religious diversity may well be found next to one that curtails public expressions of religiosity. We thus need to look at the specific local conditions that have led to such approaches. In this chapter, I have shown that contextual factors, such as the history of relations between political actors and the Catholic Church, or a tradition of interreligious dialogue, play a role in how cities govern and regulate religious diversity. Moreover, some practices, such as the provision of material resources, are more easily accommodated than others because they are viewed as an extension of the conditions and rights enjoyed by majority churches. Finally, by drawing on these elements, I have created a typology of patterns of the urban governance of religious diversity, which can serve as heuristic devices for understanding the situation in cities beyond the three in my study. It can also help systematise not only the different governance approaches but also the factors underlying them. Future research comparing cities with similar governance approaches across national contexts would allow us to identify the local conditions that lead to these outcomes.

Notes 1 France 3. (1985). Le centre culturel islamique de Rennes. In Rennes Soir. http:// fresques.ina.fr/ouest-en-memoire/fiche-media/Region00755/le-centre-culturel-isla mique-de-rennes.html 2 Talon, C. (1981, 20 January). La Fédération d’Ille-et-Vilaine du P.C.F. Revient sur son Opposition à la Construction d’un Centre Islamique. Le Monde. www.lemonde. fr/archives/article/1981/01/20/la-federation-d-ille-et-vilaine-du-p-c-f-revient-sur-sonopposition-a-la-construction-d-un-centre-islamique_2717937_1819218.html 3 Richard, L. (2011, March–April). Vivre ensemble le pluralisme des religions. Place Publique, 49–52. www.placepublique-rennes.com/media_site/upload/PP10_VIVRE_ ENSEMBLE.pdf 4 Chopin, É. (2017, March 15). Centre culturel islamique à Rennes: Vers un compromis? Ouest-France. www.ouest-france.fr/bretagne/rennes-35000/centre-culturel-islamiquerennes-vers-un-compromis-4863599 5 Information based on internal documents provided by the municipality. The allocation of public funding was approved by the city council against the opposition of four councillors. 6 Mairie de Rennes. (2016, March–April). Une nouvelle salle de recueïllement. Les Rennais, 27. 7 This information refers to 2015 and is contained in the document by Appéré, N. (2016). Pour une charte rennaise de la laïcité. Nathalie Appéré. www.nathalieappere. fr/2016/12/charte-rennaise-de-laicite/

Municipal policy instruments 37 8 Ouest-France. (2018, June 1). L’expérience d’une classe de ville pour découvrir la laïcité. Ouest-France. www.ouest-france.fr/bretagne/l-experience-d-une-classe-de-villepour-decouvrir-la-laicite-5795069 9 Ville de Bordeaux. (2008). Extrait du registre des déliberations du conseil municipal, Séance du lundi 19 mai 2008. www.bordeaux.fr/images/ebx/fr/CM/566/9/acteCM/ 7117/pieceJointeSpec/37821/file/acte_20085181_D.pdf 10 Ville de Bordeaux. (2013). Extrait du registre des déliberations du conseil municipal, Séance du lundi 23 setembre 2013. Extrait du registre des déliberations du conseil municipal, mai 19, 2008. 11 Fetouh, M. (2016, April 18). Laïcité ou dialogue interreligieux ? Intervention à la Biennale Culturelle Maçonnique de Bordeaux le 16 avril. Bordeaux Ensemble. https:// marikfetouh.com/2016/04/18/laicite-ou-dialogue-interreligieux-intervention-a-labiennale-culturelle-maconnique-de-bordeaux-le-16-avril/ 12 Fetouh, M. (2016, June 27). Repas de rupture du jeûne organisé par la FMG. Bordeaux Ensemble. https://marikfetouh.com/2016/06/27/repas-de-rupture-du-jeune-organisepar-la-fmg/ 13 Fetouh, M. (2016, 8 July). Tour du monde inter-religieux avec l’association Coexister. Bordeaux Ensemble. https://marikfetouh.com/2016/07/08/tour-du-monde-inter-religieuxavec-coexsiter/ 14 This source refers to the fact that a Protestant person was included to represent Protestants in the electoral lists of the Republican candidature in Gironde in the late 19th century. 15 In 1869, the Jewish and Protestant cemeteries were moved to a Catholic cemetery called Terre Cabade with the agreement of the whole municipal council. Interestingly, in 1884, the municipal council agreed to provide funding for the demolition of the walls that separated these cemeteries from the rest of the Catholic graves. As Lassère (1994) suggests, this move can be understood as an early laicisation of the cemetery, which would then become the rule throughout France after the 1905 law. 16 The notion of communalism (communautarisme) has become a placeholder in public and political debates in France. It is commonly used to refer to a supposed trend to strengthen “isolated” ethnic, cultural or religious groups that, by way of their inwardlooking dynamics, threaten the Republican universalist idea of citizenship. As such, public authorities perceive the need to fight those trends and prevent them from undermining social cohesion. I elaborate on this in Chapter 3. 17 Groupe Socialiste Toulouse. (2014). Une laïcité dévoyée. Groupe socialiste de la mairie de Toulouse. http://groupesocialistetoulouse.fr/2014/12/13/une-laicite-devoyee/ 18 Mairie de Toulouse. (2020). Toulouse Fraternité—Conseil de la laïcité. www.toulouse. fr/web/la-mairie/participation-citoyennete/toulouse-fraternite-conseil-de-la-laicite 19 Fetouh, M. (2016, 18 April). Laïcité ou dialogue interreligieux? Intervention à la Biennale Culturelle Maçonnique de Bordeaux le 16 avril. Bordeaux Ensemble. https:// marikfetouh.com/2016/04/18/laicite-ou-dialogue-interreligieux-intervention-a-labiennale-culturelle-maconnique-de-bordeaux-le-16-avril/

Chapter 2

Actor constellations Who is in and who is out? 1

In his renowned work Public Religions in the Modern World, José Casanova reminds us that the public presence and role of religions is a historical possibility in the modern world that should not be overlooked. Deprivatisation, which he defined as “the process whereby religion abandons its assigned place in the private sphere and enters the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society” (Casanova, 1994, pp. 65–66), forces analyses to consider the possibility that religious institutions and actors play a public role, even in societies where religion had been relegated to the private sphere. The literature on the post-secular city also argues that religion and religious actors “have returned to the centre of public life, especially public policy, governance, and social identity” (Beaumont & Baker, 2011, p.  1). According to this perspective, there is a “rapprochement” between religious and non-religious actors, and religious organisations and institutions are re-engaging in urban governance and service delivery. This chapter analyses the actor constellations involved in the urban governance of religious diversity by focusing on three main issues. First, I identify the actors in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse, and explore the politics of exclusion and inclusion and the unequal distribution of legitimacy. Secondly, I show that nonstate actors are drawn into processes of governance in which they may become co-opted. I dig into this issue of co-optation, understood as “the capacity to tie strategically relevant actors . . . to the regime elite” (Gerschewski, 2013, p. 22), with a special focus on religious minorities. Finally, I examine how these minorities self-represent themselves, in response to both these co-optation attempts and more general interpellations by the media and general public debates. In doing so, I show how they navigate their in-between position as both agenda carriers and minority advocates. Adopting a governance perspective requires taking into account the interactions between state and non-state actors (Klijn, 2008; Le Galès, 1995), as well as their differential capacities and resources, perceptions and preferences in the policymaking process (Scharpf, 1997). In my research, this implied considering the unequal position and roles of state actors, as well as religious and non-religious civil-society actors. In this chapter, I follow Haynes and Hennig’s (2013, p.  1) definition of religious actors as “representatives of or individuals belonging to a

Actor constellations 39

community or organisation which is overtly informed by religious references”, who are part of any religious tradition and express their religious or political concerns in the public sphere. These actors may, but do not have to, be religious leaders or authorities. Moreover, I also consider non-religious actors who also play a role in discussions and negotiations around religion and its place in the public sphere. My research is about “corporate actors” and associations (Scharpf, 1997)—representatives of organisations, institutions and associations rather than individuals and their individual preferences and interests.

Governance networks around religion Studying actors is crucial in understanding the governance of religious diversity. The composition of the religious field in a concrete urban context and its transformations through international migration, secularisation and internal diversification have consequences for how religious minorities raise their claims and how they are subsequently addressed. Moreover, actors’ differential access to resources—both material and symbolic—and power are also key to understanding governance (Koenig, 2009). Access to power is often dependent upon the connections that actors have, particularly in a context where governance happens through networks. Thus, whether a representative of a minority religious group has more or less direct access to networks of decision-making or not matters for the possibilities of that group building trust, having its voice heard and ultimately influencing policy decisions. Networks are prevalent in the governance of religious diversity (Martikainen, 2013), especially in urban contexts (Dinham & Lowndes, 2008; Griera, 2012; Martínez-Ariño, 2019; Nagel, 2010). I understand governance networks as institutionalised forms of more or less horizontal cooperation between state and nonstate actors for the solution of societal problems (Blanco et al., 2011; Klijn, 2008). In this case, these problems are related to matters of religion and state secularism. These networks can take the specific form of “invited spaces” (Cornwall, 2008), that is, institutionalised consultation bodies driven by governments with a selection of community actors. In particular, as is the case of my study, networks of state actors and religious representatives, citizen participation fora and one-off forms of consultation have become common means to govern religion. These bodies can serve multiple functions, including the establishment of relations between faith representatives and municipal governments, the dissemination of knowledge about religion, mediation to address controversies, delivering services and a symbolic representation of good understanding between religions (Griera & Forteza, 2011).

Urban actor constellations in French cities Who are the actors directly or indirectly involved in the governance of religious diversity in French cities, and who are those excluded and self-excluded? In my

40  Actor constellations

fieldwork in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse, I encountered a wide variety of actors that participated, with various degrees of intensity, in discussions and negotiations of religious diversity. I am aware that the range of actors I got in contact with was partially limited and biased because of the effects of snowball sampling. My initial contacts—mostly institutional actors of municipalities and the main religious organisations—affected the other actors I subsequently reached out to. However, this gave me a sense of who is in the regular “circuits” of cities, as one of my interviewees, a member of an Evangelical church excluded from those, put it. My fieldwork partly reproduced those circuits. However, I tried to expand them by getting directly in contact with smaller or less-visible religious organisations, including Jehovah’s Witnesses and Evangelical churches. In what follows, I map the key actors and their roles in the urban governance of religion, starting out with the state actors, followed by religious actors and finally the non-religious civil-society actors, with special attention given to what I call “laïcité actors”, or “secularist actors”. The mayor, the deputy mayor and the prefect The mayor, the deputy mayor in charge of relations with religious groups and the prefect—the representative of the central state at the local level—are the key state actors in urban governance of religion. French mayors are powerful political figures with strong local and national influence (Borraz, 2000) who enjoy great popularity and legitimacy among their constituencies (Le Bart, 2017). They are also key actors of the governance of religion, and their vision on secularism and religion, in particular, on Islam, is of great importance (Duthu, 2009). As I have shown in Chapter 1, the mayors of Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse are directly involved in initiatives related to the governance of religion. For example, the mayor of Rennes at the time I did my research commissioned, inaugurated and presided the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes. Previously, one of Rennes’ historic mayors, Edmond Hervé, had taken the requests of religious minorities as an almost personal issue. It was under his mandate that different plots in the municipal cemetery were built for Muslims and Jews, and the policy of building cultural centres for religious minorities was initiated. In Bordeaux, the setting up of a yearly public interreligious conference was also the initiative of the mayor, who remains a prominent figure in it. Moreover, it is often the mayor who cultivates regular relations with religious groups and leaders. In Toulouse, the successive mayors played a significant role in the setting up of the two consultative bodies (Conseil de la laïcité, first, and Toulouse Fraternité, later). However, mayors do not work alone. Usually, one of their close deputy mayors is officially in charge of the issue. Many cities in France have installed a deputy mayor in charge of relations with religious organisations (frequently called “Adjoint au Maire chargé des relations aux cultes”). This politician is responsible for establishing institutional bridges with the local mainstream religious

Actor constellations 41

organisations. In cases such as Rennes, the title of the position explicitly includes the reference to religions (cultes), as a municipal employee explained to me: In fact, it was a voluntary decision that the office [of relations with religions] be identified as a laïcité reference within the municipality. Before that, religion was something that was treated in the office for the fight against discrimination and the will was really to have a position. . . . It was a political preference. In Bordeaux, the name of the position is broader: Adjoint au Maire chargé de l’égalité, la citoyanneté et la lutte contre les discriminations (deputy mayor in charge of equality, citizenship and the fight against discrimination). The choice of this name was not accidental, but an attempt to prevent criticism and controversy from emerging. As the vice-mayor put it: I asked myself whether to put laïcité in the name of the department or not. Putting laïcité in the title would create a problem rather than solve it. So, I opted for citizenship which is more global and which includes this question of laïcité. The contested nature of the position’s name was confirmed by a comment made by a secularist association in Bordeaux. In an interview with me, the representative criticised that laïcité does not appear in the title of the position: “Deputy mayor in charge of diversity; there is no reference to laïcité in his delegation. I have asked him why and he answered ‘it’s not possible’”. Usually, public officials and administrative staff in the office of this deputy mayor are in charge of the daily contact with religious organisations. They are more acquainted with the practical dimension of governance and are the first entry point for religious groups and other related associations: “I am really the entry point, which prevents that they [religious groups] submit a request to the different city services. It is more organised if it goes through me and I take it over”, one municipal employee in Rennes told me. Finally, the prefect also plays a relevant role in establishing relations with various religious organisations. As local representatives of the central state, prefects are the contact point for religious organisations in matters that exceed the competences of municipal governments, such as the official registration as religious associations. The prefecture and its administration also intervene in matters of security. In Rennes, for instance, it was the representative of the prefecture who attended one of the meetings of the Committee consultatif laïcité to discuss issues related to security and countering terrorism. In the case of Toulouse, the signature of the Charter of Fraternity by the Minister of Interior and representatives of several religious organisations after the 2015 attacks took place in the prefecture of the department of Haute-Garonne. The prefecture grants any event an official character.

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Other state actors also play a role in the governance of religious diversity. Through their work in the municipal council and their participation in the various consultative bodies set up in their cities, councillors may also partly shape this regulation. Moreover, as I expand on in Chapter 5, the Observatoire de la laïcité2 (Observatory of Secularism), along with various ministries and inter-municipal networks, such as the Association des Maires de France, also have an influence on how religion is governed and regulated in urban contexts. However, in this chapter I mostly focus on those actors that are present in the field on a daily basis. This combination of three key state actors—mayors, deputy mayors and prefects—shows the relevance of examining the municipal as well as multilevel nature of the governance of religion. City actors like the mayor and the deputy mayor in charge of relations with religious groups do not work in isolation, but instead interact with representatives of the central state. Urban state actors also actively draw on the local fabric of city associations and interact with religious and secular organisations when it comes to discussing, negotiating and regulating religious diversity. Therefore, a perspective on multilevel governance, which looks not only at the interaction between different politico-administrative levels, but also between both state and non-state actors, is crucial (Bader, 2007; Zincone & Caponio, 2006). Who is in and who is out? Religious actors in urban governance networks The increasing political salience of religious controversies and of immigrant religious minorities has expanded the scope of intervention and influence of these groups beyond issues related to religion (Permoser et al., 2010). Because of the resources that they can provide to urban political authorities, they are frequently seen as partners in urban governance (De Galembert, 2006; Dinham & Lowndes, 2008). Municipalities often call upon them to address issues as diverse as immigrant integration, the fight against radicalisation, urban poverty programmes and municipal secularism. This is also the case in France, despite it often being socially, politically and academically portrayed as the classic example of colour-blind Republicanism and strict separation of church and state. Urban policymakers in France draw upon religious groups to deal with multiple policy issues more and more (Lamine, 2004). In doing so, group categories based on religion are reinforced (Burchardt, 2017), thereby introducing an intermediate level of interaction between individual citizens and the state. To identify the religious actors in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse, I take the three invited spaces set up there as starting points. This limits the range of actors to those that are recognised as governance partners by others and, thus, are part of the mainstream. However, by identifying mainstream actors, I can then analyse how these produce exclusions.

Actor constellations 43

In Bordeaux Partages, only religious actors are involved, while in the Rennes and Toulouse bodies, both religious and secular actors take part. All three fora share a quite stable core of religious traditions: Buddhists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Protestants. This selection, which resembles the model of world religions (Hervieu-Léger, 2001) also followed in other European countries is seen as exhausting the possibilities of religious representation by state authorities. When one city official in Toulouse explained to me the composition of that city’s body, he said “all religions are there”. State actors share a clear understanding of what does and does not constitute a religion. Pentecostal churches, Jehovah’s Witnesses, less established branches of Islam, Hindus and other smaller groups are not even considered. When I asked some of my interviewees about these smaller or marginalised groups, their responses were, first, of surprise or ignorance, and, second, rather negative reactions. This is not surprising in a context where a very strong discourse against so-called “sects” dominates public and political discourses around minority groups. A parliamentary commission to investigate sectarian groups was established first in 1995, later developed into an inter-ministerial mission to combat sects in 1998 (Mission interministérielle de lutte contre les sectes) (Ollion, 2017), and then an inter-ministerial mission of vigilance and combat against sectarian drifts in 2002 (Mission interministérielle de vigilance et de lutte contre les dérives sectaires) (Palmer, 2011). Although not the topic of this book, it is evident that this national discourse and approach to New Religious Movements still has an impact on how policymakers on the ground perceive certain minority groups (Hervieu-Léger, 2001). Yet, this lack of recognition does not only happen with groups considered sectarian. Protestant minorities that do not belong to the mainstream churches, for example, also experience it. As one non-mainstream Protestant pastor in Bordeaux explained to me, French municipalities, and the French state more broadly, recognises the “five big religions and they don’t go any further, they don’t try to go any further”. Moreover, this pastor went on to indicate that official recognition as a religious association does not immediately translate into broader social recognition by municipalities. Another Evangelical pastor I interviewed was critical of this form of exclusion. When I asked him if he had been invited to one of the multiple interreligious celebrations organised after the November Paris attacks, he replied: Well, I wasn’t contacted for that. There is a circuit, which for me is somewhat limited, where there are representatives of the Evangelical churches who are in contact with the interreligious movement and the municipality, but which completely excludes the others. For me it remains a mystery. And he went on to comment on the “by default” presence of the pastor of the mainstream Reformed church: “there is, obviously, the reformed Pastor because in France the reformed pastor is always sought, he is in these circuits”. The social

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boundaries that these formal contacts create and reproduce—sometimes internally to a religious tradition—translate into symbolic boundaries that divide between insiders and outsiders, legitimate and non-legitimate religious representatives (Duemmler & Nagel, 2013). Of particular concern to state actors, including those responsible for the consultative bodies in the cities of my study, is which Muslim actors should be deemed “appropriate” and “representative” of the whole Muslim population. Even more, the issue has to do with the very fact of establishing contact with the local Islamic communities, as one municipal employee in Rennes put it: The particularity of this [Islamic] center is that it is private, it is not a city building. It is the first construction of a private mosque in our city. So, we do not have relationships in the same way as with those centres which are in a building of the city. It is a different relationship. However, even if they are a private centre, they are part of a partnership with the city. They are completely consistent with our Republican principles, an open Islam. And so, we also have good relations with them. A local journalist referred to the “acceptance” of this private Islamic centre by the municipal authorities by saying that it got “the green light” of the city. This idea of an open and transparent Islam, considered to be the “good” Islam, is something I develop further in Chapter 4. However, this exemplifies how common-sense knowledge and discourses translate into concrete everyday governance practices. The selection of religious “representatives” thus remains one of the most contested elements of these invited spaces. It has implications in terms of representativeness, or lack thereof, and highlights the incapacity to take into account the internal heterogeneity of most religious traditions (Chapman & Lowndes, 2009). The issue is not exclusive to the French context, where it remains an unresolved question (Lamine, 2005; Martínez-Ariño, 2019). The selection of religious representatives is discussed and contested in other contexts as well, including Germany (Duemmler & Nagel, 2013; Konyali et al., 2019), Austria (Permoser et al., 2010) and Switzerland (Baumann & Tunger-Zanetti, 2018), to name just a few. Moreover, there is a risk that cooperation in policymaking only happens with non-state actors who share the views and agenda of the municipal government. Two interviewees in Rennes, both members of civil-society associations, questioned the composition of the Comité consultatif laïcité, arguing that those participating are the actors who are closer to the government’s position. Interestingly, religious actors frequently also meet in spaces of interreligious dialogue born out of the communities themselves. In all three cities, grassroots Muslim-Christian and Christian-Jewish dialogue groups, called Amitié islamochrétienne and Amitié judéo-chrétienne, are a common reality. Other interreligious groups are larger in scope and include Christians of different denominations, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. These groups, which organise conferences, debates and shared meals, see themselves as pioneers of official dialogue settings. Two

Actor constellations 45

members of such bottom-up groups, in Rennes and Bordeaux, respectively, reclaim their role in setting up official groups: We are basically 20 years ahead of them [official dialogue groups]. That’s what we’ve been doing since the 80s. Bordeaux-Partage was created to dialogue. Here you have for example the Islamic-Christian dialogue, there is the Judeo-Christian dialogue, so the churches have been exchanging and dialoguing for a very long time. There is a dialogue with the Buddhists too. The municipality is not the only initiator of the dialogue. I believe it is because there is a long habit of dialogue between the churches and the religious leaders that Bordeaux Partage was not created by itself. Similarly, the Coexister organisation has founded a number of local groups where youngsters from different religions meet to discuss their perspectives. I had the chance to interview one member of the local Bordeaux group and attended one meeting of the local Rennes group. While most of the activities Coexister organises are held independently, others are co-organised with municipal authorities. An example of this was the presentation of the “Interfaith tour” at the City Hall of Bordeaux, where deputy mayor Marik Fetouh praised the work of this youth team and its cooperation with the city.3 These spaces are seed laboratories where future interreligious leaders may be trained in the art of “dialoguing”. Next to religious groups and members of the municipal government and administration, the bodies of Rennes and Toulouse4 also include a range of secular civil-society actors, such as members of the municipal groups in the city council, representatives of secularist groups, Freemasons, NGOs, experts and representatives of education. Moreover, it is notable that a small atheist association, La libre pensée, declined an invitation to participate in both committees. Its members considered that, by inviting religious representatives to the committee, the municipalities were violating the separation between churches and the state. One member of the local Rennes branch of this association shared their stance in an interview with me: “We are ready to be interviewed by the mayor, but not to discuss living together with priests” and went on to indicate that the fact that the municipality conferred with the representatives of religious groups was infringing the 1905 law. They sarcastically called the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes the “Comité concordataire”, and believed that it didn’t serve any purpose. The self-exclusion of La libree pensée from both consultative bodies, while not surprising, given its atheist and anti-clerical nature, highlights the contested nature of religion and state secularism. In Bordeaux, the body’s scope is more limited and only includes representatives of religious groups, the mayor and a deputy mayor. In the mayor’s own words, Bordeaux Partage is “a small body where I gather the cardinal, the rabbi, the Protestant pastor, the imam and the representative of the Buddhists to share the Republican values, which are common to us”.5 While at some point, discussions

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among the members took place to decide whether secular actors (including Freemasons and atheists) who had requested participation should be accepted, they finally rejected that option. This decision was convincing for the deputy mayor in charge of the body. For one of the secularist associations in Bordeaux, the decision reflects the particular wishes of the Catholic representative: “No, we are not invited. But why are we not invited? Because Monsignor the Archbishop does not want atheists in Bordeaux Partage”. “Laïcité actors” and other civil-society associations This last point concerning the exclusion of secular actors from the Bordeaux interreligious conference serves as an entry point to the third type of actors that are directly concerned with the urban governance of religion, i.e., non-religious civilsociety organisations. While I mostly focus on what I call “laïcité defenders”, “laïcité actors” or “secularist actors”, I also consider the presence of other civilsociety organisations whose main goal is not the promotion of laïcité but which are also involved in the discussions. By laïcité or secularist actors I mean those actors, usually associations, whose main purpose is to put laïcité at the centre of the public debate and policy agenda. They often surveil the state, ensuring that the 1905 law is applied properly and wish to educate the public on these matters. Examples of such civil-society associations are local branches of La libre pensée, La Ligue de l’enseignement and, more recently, department-based associations called Laïcité followed by the number of the department postcode: the Comité Laïcité 35, an umbrella association of other local associations working on laïcité, for the case of the department of Ille-et-Vilaine of which Rennes is the capital; and Laïcité 33 for the Gironde department, of which Bordeaux is the capital city. In Toulouse, Comité Laïcité Republique Toulouse Midi Pyrénées, the local branch of the national association Comité Laïcité Republique, would represent another example of the types of actors I refer to here. Some of their most visible actions are the planting of arbres de la laïcité (trees of secularism) in various cities, the commemoration of the 1905 law anniversary, the celebration of public conferences and debates on secularism, the organisation of exhibitions in public spaces, and urban routes highlighting historical figures and places related to laïcité. These events often occur with the approval, promotion and collaboration of municipalities. Shifting conditions, especially after 2015, generated spaces for laicist actors to become more active and visible in the public sphere. For the member of one laicist association in Bordeaux, it wasn’t necessarily the events in 2015 which increased the relevance of associations like theirs, “but let’s say that the events in 2015 did crystallised a number of problems that were latent”. The attacks generated the conditions for laicist groups to position themselves and get more attention than what they had gotten before.6 The president of one secularist association in

Actor constellations 47

Rennes referred to this changing landscape of actors in relation to the defence of secularism: We clearly feel a current of re-laicisation in France because the Mitterrand period was disastrous for secularism in France, totally disastrous. . . . There is now a reorganisation of the secularist movement, in particular the big organisations like La ligue de l’enseignement. In such a context of reorganisation and re-laicisation, which one of my interviewees from an interreligious association referred to as “a complete obsession with laïcité”, secularist actors emerged or expanded their capacity to raise their voice. They saw in the promotion of laïcité and its increasing public appeal an opportunity to raise their demands, become more visible in the public sphere, and get closer to centres of power as “defenders” and “protectors” of the law. This is clear in the words of the representative of one such association in Rennes: We founded this association 3 years ago [beginning of 2013], precisely because we felt the need to put laïcité at the heart of the debates in the city and we planted a tree of secularism near the judicial city with the agreement of Mr. Delaveau, the former mayor. So, we started to somehow appear as a force concerned with the defense of secularism and as such we asked municipal candidates, departmental candidates, European candidates to position themselves on secularism. And Nathalie Appéré [the Mayor of Rennes] included the creation of an advisory committee on secularism in her proposals for her [electoral] program. We thought laïcité was diminishing a bit and then after the events of January [2015] it was a little rushed. The fact that this association was created in 2013 shows that 2015 was not the first moment for the increasing activation of this field of actors. Already before, with the 2004 and 2010 laws and the debates around the display of religious symbols, the issue of secularism was a big concern. 2015 heightened the salience of the debates. As the president of a secularist association in Bordeaux explained to me, the time after the 2015 attacks opened up the doors of the municipalities for them: When we spoke to the municipalities, it all came together very favourably and we were there in the right place at the right time. Well, it is not necessarily a calculation on our part, but I think that all of this can be explained in the sense that local authorities, in very general terms, make us part of their confusion with regard to the problems of secularism. In other words, “being in the right place at the right time” was the key to accessing municipalities and putting the issue of laïcité on their agenda. Municipalities, faced with the need to respond to the new context by showing their commitment

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to laïcité, were more receptive to the requests and suggestions of these groups. This same actor indicated that sometimes it was even the mayors who would request a meeting with them. Moreover, to highlight the status that this issue of secularism had acquired, he emphasised that it was the mayors whom he would meet: “we always meet the mayors, that is a constant; it is quite revealing. We’ve never been asked by a deputy mayor or a department head. It is always the first elected official [the mayor] that we meet”. Secularist actors may use their increasingly salient roles in a context of reinforcement of laïcité discourses to reposition themselves towards other actors in the field and the broader public. They see their role as crucial in putting secularism at the centre of the agenda and supporting municipalities in their work around it. However, they do not consider it their role to do the job of municipalities. Rather, they see their work more as that of a “policy entrepreneur” (Mintrom & Norman, 2009) than that of executing the decisions of political leaders. They propose policy ideas and specific measures to mayors and other municipal officials and push for their implementation. The field of laïcité actors is heterogeneous. While the more predominant views that I encountered align with a form of “assertive secularism” (Kuru, 2007), there are also those who advocate a more passive or “open” approach, one which allows more room for the public expression of religion (Baubérot, 2015). According to Alice Picard (2017), who investigated this field of actors in great detail, part of the discussions held in the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes and differences in positions had more to do with a power struggle between advocates of assertive secularism and those in favour of a passive version than a disagreement between religious and non-religious actors. From her perspective, much of the struggle is about who in this field of actors “owns” the policy problem and is able to impose a particular understanding of laïcité. Finally, next to this militant secularist milieu, other non-state actors are part of discussions held in Rennes and Toulouse. Anti-racist associations, e.g., LICRA, SOS Racisme and LDH, as well as other interest groups, e.g., neighbourhood associations and economic actors such as chambers of commerce and small business associations, may also have a say when discussing the conditions for the public practice and expression of religion. Moreover, local media, and especially concrete journalists specialising in religious news, also contribute to debates and may also engage in policing the religious field. One journalist I interviewed saw his profession’s obligation to point out the “presence of Salafists” and the “communitarian or fundamentalists drifts” that they would observe in the city and try to “thwart the ignorance that leads to fear”. My concern and that of the newspaper in terms of the field is really to make things easier, to hinder the misunderstandings that encourage fears. After the attacks of November 13, I organised a meeting with all the executives of local Islam to ask them what it was within their troops, within their ranks on the evolution of fundamentalism and on how they perceived these events

Actor constellations 49

and what their reactions were. That led to a newspaper article where all the executives of the official Islam in the city clearly said that Islam is a religion of peace. It’s a proactive approach on our part to facilitate dialogue, if you will. He did not want to act as a “witch hunter” or as the Inquisition, identifying minority churches and groups. He rather wants to do “justice” to all religious groups in the city and have them represented in the pages of the media.

Governance from within: do municipalities co-opt religious actors? Religious actors actively contribute to discussions on policymaking by bringing in their expert knowledge (Griera & Forteza, 2011). In their role as experts, they can be considered an epistemic community (Sandal, 2011). They often participate in the policy design phase. In the Rennes consultative body, they actively drew the lines of what should be accepted as appropriate religious behaviour and what should be rejected in the name of respecting laïcité, the neutrality of the state and the freedom of others. Of course, the power to make public claims is not equally distributed and those groups deemed more suspicious, particularly Islam, have less room to manoeuvre. With their knowledge and networks, religious actors also play an intermediation function during the implementation of public policy, especially when municipal governments have difficulties reaching out to certain population groups (Braun-Poppelaars & Hanegraaff, 2013; Permoser et al., 2010). A representative of a mainstream Protestant church and member of the Fédération Protestante de France explained one example of this mediating role to me: Some churches find it difficult to establish themselves, to find places to build, because people are wary of many Evangelical churches today. For example, municipalities sometimes call us to find out if a particular church is a sect, even if they are old and honourable churches. In other words: they are not a sect at all. In fact, this was the big issue fifteen years ago and it is no longer the subject at all, but so far it is not clear who these churches are. The Federation is considered an established and trustful partner of the state, and its knowledge and advice about other minority churches is considered a useful tool for authorities to regulate religion. This is a clear example of regulation from within the religious field: by policing the boundaries of the “acceptable” religious groups, the position of certain groups over others is reinforced. Moreover, religious actors can also become political resources for politicians and policymakers to legitimise and implement their political agendas (De Galembert; Permoser et al., 2010). The municipal governments of Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse draw on the “civic infrastructure” (Dinham & Lowndes, 2008, p. 825)

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of civil-society organisations, both religious and secular, to address religious matters in their cities. Municipal actors frequently see the religious actors they are in regular contact with as carriers of governance agendas and as means to implement policy decisions. For one of the municipal politicians that I interviewed in Bordeaux, their work with religious groups in the city is not a matter of relations with religions for the sake of having relations with them. To the contrary, we have relations with religions to send a symbol that religious actors talk to each other, talk to the mayor, and respect each other. And they are also messengers towards their communities. Similarly, an official in the area of cemeteries in Bordeaux explained the role of religious leaders as brokers when implementing measures in this domain: I have fairly close relationships with the various imams so that when there are difficulties or things like that, we try to deal with them upstream. I try to make sure that the Muslim community resolves any problems there may be applying the rules of procedure as best as possible with the imam. It is true that when you have the support of religious authorities it is easier because the community listens to its representatives better than to the representatives of the administration. It avoids a lot of difficulties. Politicians also turn to religious groups for support in moments of crisis, such as the unrest provoked by terrorist attacks. As a Protestant representative in Toulouse explained to me, after the terrorist attacks of Mohammed Merah at the Jewish school, the prefecture “requested that religious representatives be more often visible together and not only when there is a drama. We agreed and wrote a Charter of Fraternity”. In this case, civil authorities requested religious groups to make a public statement for peace. Similarly, an interreligious prayer was organised in Rennes after the November 2015 attacks in Paris at the initiative of religious representatives with the support of civil authorities. In that event, which I attended, and where the prefect, the current and the ancient mayors, military and other civil authorities were present, local religious groups signed a text in favour of peace. In Bordeaux, too, the municipality requested religious actors to react to the situation. One of the members of Bordeaux Partage shared this in an interview with me: When there are events that we have lived, attacks, etc., the municipality requests us that we manifest a calm word as much as possible, to take a stand very quickly on all these painful situations. While these requests only ask for a symbolic commitment, municipalities also try to incorporate religious actors in their policies more directly. An example of this is the co-optation of Muslim representatives to fight radicalisation locally. The Centre d’action et de prevention contre la radicalisation des individus (CAPRI), a

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publicly funded association, was founded by the city of Bordeaux in collaboration with the Fédération musulmane de Gironde and a research society on mental control. Local Muslim representatives are part of this centre, something the deputy mayor who promoted it is very proud of: “we managed to make the centre for the prevention of radicalisation with Muslims in particular, because Muslims are a stakeholder in the centre”. This is not the only occasion when Muslim actors are required to do “internal surveillance” work. Religious actors differ in their level of organisation, institutionalisation, mobilisation capacity, and the political and social functions they play (Künkler & Leininger, 2009). Moreover, their legal status and, importantly, social legitimacy also vary significantly. Thus, their position in governance networks and capacity to negotiate and bargain with the state, influence the political agenda and have their concerns heard vary considerably. Muslim and non-mainstream religious actors are less likely to have their requests taken into account, as their legitimacy is not a given. Moreover, since these groups depend more on the financial resources that municipalities provide for their cultural activities, they often find themselves in a quite challenging position. Their economic viability relies on those subsidies, which makes them more vulnerable and less autonomous. Having politicians from the Rennes Municipal Council in the boards of Islamic cultural centres as a condition for receiving funding from the municipality is the clearest example of this dependence and subsequent control.

Agenda carriers or minority advocates? The in-betweenness of religious actors Do these governance roles that state actors assign to religious groups correspond with their self-representations? How do these roles and the related political influence and public visibility impact upon these groups and their internal relations and power balances? Drawing on the notion of self-representations proposed by Margreet van Es, I examine how religious actors position themselves towards the opportunities and risks of engaging in governance processes. Understood as “any explicit or implicit statement about oneself or the group that one claims to belong to, whether in the form of texts, images, or bodily behaviours” (van Es, 2016, p.  10), the self-representations of groups that I examine next show how actors position themselves towards the state and interpellations by the media and general public debates. My main argument is that minority groups are active agents in the urban governance of religious diversity and not simply passive policy recipients. Their roles are multiple and not univocal. While they are partly dependent upon the resources—both material and symbolic—that they often receive from municipalities, and the forms of control the later entail, these organisations have a certain margin of movement that they can use strategically. In a context of increasing visibility of religious organisations linked to their cooperation with municipal authorities, these actors have the opportunity to

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“reposition themselves in the discursive landscape by strategically constructing the identity of their religious community to avoid being identified as the Other” (Permoser et al., 2010, p. 1475). Participating in urban policymaking can serve as an opportunity for these minority religions to challenge representations that “other” them because of their non-Christianity and their religiousness (Casanova, 2007; Permoser et al., 2010). Interreligious fora can be particularly attractive settings for minority groups to achieve and perform national belonging and selfrepresent themselves as good citizens (Liebmann, 2018). Religious groups both internalise and critically challenge the roles and requirements imposed from the outside. In my study, they emphasised their attachment to laïcité as the principle on which they base their engagement in public debates and consultation. One Protestant pastor saw this as the basic requirement for him to have his voice heard and recognised: sometimes it annoys me a little, they [laicist actors] say “ah, you are a priest”, but no, I am not “a priest”, there is no one more laïc than me. I have no tonsure. To be religious you need a tonsure, you have to be a priest, you have to enter a religious order. I am not ordained myself. A commitment to the so-called “Republican values”—whatever those may be for each person—, signs of loyalty to the state and an explicit support of laïcité— again, whatever that may mean for each actor—are the “passport” for religious actors to be considered legitimate governance partners. The pressure to conform to a certain standard is much higher for Muslim actors than for other groups that are not perceived as a threat to social cohesion and the idealised Republican understanding of religion in public life. Islamic religiosity is often considered a threat to the taken-for-granted secularity of the country’s public sphere. Therefore, self-representations of Muslims often reflect an awareness of a duty of “social hypercorrectness” (Sayad, 1999). The latter is expressed in different ways. One is to present Islam as part of France, as one of my Muslim interviewees put it: “There is a history that binds France and Islam together, a very long history”. This identification of Islam with France is expressed further by reinforcing the loyalty of Muslims to the Republic. Another Muslim interviewee referred to this as follows: Over time, the Muslim community has succeeded in settling down and giving an image of living well together, an image of openness, an image of tolerance, an image of community, of open citizens attached to the values of the Republic. Muslim actors express this commitment to the Republic by referring to their relations with authorities and their wish to “cooperate” with them. Examples of Muslim actors’ self-representations as trustworthy governance partners abound in my

Actor constellations 53

research. The same Muslim actor, a representative of a mainstream organisation, put it this way: We may not agree on everything but, frankly, we cannot forget what the municipality of Rennes did and continues to do for the Muslims of Rennes. There is good understanding, there is good cooperation, there is really mutual trust. I will continue collaborating with the City of Rennes, always, to work for good living together, for the respect of diversity, for the respect of each other’s culture and for the respect of the laws and values that make France. Representatives of mainstream Islamic organisations make big efforts to counteract ideas of Muslims as deviant populations. The need to demonstrate these civic virtues became evident during my interview with this person. He received a few phone calls from journalists during the two hours we spent together, to which he always responded politely, showing his attachment to the political principles of the French Republic. Our interview took place only a few days after the attack at the Bataclan club in Paris. Although the exigence to commit to the “Republican creed” puts more pressure on Muslim representatives who need to constantly dispel suspicion, other minority religions also feel the need to show their commitment. References to respect for the “Republican values” were constant in the interviews. A Toulusain Jewish representative stressed his commitment to laïcité like this: We show how Jews adapted to laïcité, to the Republic, and that’s it. It is true that for us, the attachment to laïcité, to the Republic, is essential. I mean, if it weren’t for laïcité, we wouldn’t be able to exercise our religion in good conditions and we know to which extent laïcité is important to us. Interestingly, to counter suspicion, minorities with less contacts with public officials or who do not enjoy their trust may be proactive in establishing connections with them. A non-mainstream Protestant pastor in Bordeaux explained his approach to public authorities to me: “what I do when I arrive to a city is that I get in touch with them [la prefecture de la police] in order to make myself known”. This strategy to introduce themselves as trustworthy evidences the extra efforts that some minorities have to make to even their disadvantaged starting point. Similarly, some minorities adopt the political agenda of state authorities as their own to present themselves as actors of the policymaking process and governance partners. The calls of municipal authorities upon religious leaders to demonstrate their friendship and togetherness to reject violence—to which I referred before—are an example of this. Religious groups quickly respond to these requests. One of the minority religious representatives in Bordeaux Partage indicated this as follows: “it seems to all of us, and I deeply believe in it, it seems important to us to play our conciliatory role in the city”. And although

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this working together may not always seem obvious to all religious leaders, it is moments of crisis which reassure them of their potential to contribute to their city. This same person admitted that the worst is, perhaps, that what united us the most was the adversity when we found ourselves confronted with the Paris events of Charlie Hebdo. There we really understood that we had a role to play and we had to be united. The co-optation of religious representatives is not exclusive to France, but in this case, with a strong tradition of state control of religion, it is more evident. The acceptance of state control on the part of religious minorities, in particular Islam, is common. However, actors also question the extent to which they should adopt this role, since they sometimes feel that politicians instrumentalise them. A minority religious representative raised this point in our interview: All of a sudden, religious leaders become “partners”, in quotation marks, or people to contact. . . . How far can we respond to solicitations when they are sometimes only occasional? The difficulty remains how far can we go. . . . Are we only solicited in emergency situations? When do we want to be partners and when are we nothing but pretexts or excuses? Another critique to becoming co-opted and instrumentalised by municipalities in order to self-regulate the religious field from within came from one religious leader in a discussion of the Rennes committee. For him, the debate on the regulation of the veil worn by Muslim mothers in school outings was an attack, particularly against those women who were absent from the room and could not respond to the appeals. He considered it “a very weak debate because it is only against Islam. What about Orthodox women wearing a veil?” His intervention was the only one pointing at the “elephant in the interreligious room” (Liebmann, 2019) that Islam and Muslim women’s religious practices represented in the committee. By pointing out that it is not only Muslim women who wear a veil, he not only subverted stereotypes about these women but also signalled the bias and discrimination that were implicitly reproduced in the debates, even if participants tried to avoid them. To conclude, what do these self-representations say about minority religious groups and their participation in governance? Do their roles as agenda carriers and police of the religious field represent a form of co-optation or a means for emancipation that they themselves use strategically? In some instances, these roles are felt as an imposition and instrumentalisation by political authorities. In others, increased political participation can be a platform to project a particular image that helps minorities, in particular Muslims, to counteract stereotypes. Yet, this does not mean that the identity work to conform to demands of loyalty, correctness and good behaviour costs nothing. It can create animosity within religious communities, who might find their co-religionists too complacent with

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these requirements. Moreover, minority groups face restrictions to their advocacy work because they are dependent upon municipal subsidies. Similarly, not all actors enjoy the same symbolic resources. Muslim groups, in particular, are subjected to closer scrutiny and their positions are restricted by this framework of suspicion. Participating in urban governance puts minority representatives in an in-between position as carriers of “national values” and policy agendas, and as advocates of the rights of their communities and groups.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the actor constellations involved in the urban governance of diversity and the politics of inclusion and exclusion. More specifically, I have shown that a variety of state and non-state, religious and non-religious actors are considered legitimate partners for the regulation and self-regulation of religion in cities. Religious organisations are embedded in governance structures. In a context where radicalisation is seen as one of the main challenges faced by European states (Edmunds, 2012), policymakers see these organisations as “repositories of resources” for urban governance (Dinham & Lowndes, 2008, p. 829). However, not every group is perceived equally. Those who form the core of the so-called world religions are recognised and well-established. The newer diversities, the religious nature of which is not taken for granted or whose practices are considered incompatible with the laws of the Republic, remain, for the most part, out of the governance circuits. This dualistic structure of insiders and outsiders reinforces the symbolic boundaries between “good” and “bad” or “legitimate” and “illegitimate” religious actors. The selection of participants in consultation bodies and governance networks influences the definition of policy problems and solutions and thus has immediate consequences that affect different groups unevenly. Invited spaces and their composition are, thus, not neutral policy tools: they produce and display the shape and amount of religious diversity that is considered “acceptable”. Finally, cities differ in the range of non-religious civil-society organisations that partake in urban governance. The socio-political situation after the recent terrorist attacks in France boosted the presence and visibility of some secularist actors in public discussions, affecting the configuration of the actor constellations and the content of the debates. The Charlie Hebdo and November Paris terrorist attacks opened up an opportunity for some secularist actors to reposition themselves in the public sphere. Other actors have a less visible, but also relevant, influence in the governance of religious diversity. Two examples are a Rennes neighbours’ association that brought the building of a mosque in front of the courts in 1980 and the individuals who brought the case of a Christian cross in a public square in the town of Proërml to the tribunals, both of which I discuss in Chapter 5. One could think of other actors, such as small business associations, parents’ associations, the local branches of trade unions and political parties, as well as other civilsociety organisations that could mobilise either to contest or in support of certain religious controversies.

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Notes 1 For parts of this chapter, I benefited greatly from discussions with Alice Picard (2019), who, at the moment of my research, was conducting her PhD research in Rennes. Her deep knowledge of the local field of actors, in particular of those I call “secularist actors”, was particularly useful for me to get a better grasp of developments happening there. I would like to thank her for those conversations and insights. 2 The Observatoire de la laïcité is a national body established by the Prime Minister in 2007 to advise the national government in its policies regarding the application of the principle of laïcité in public services. 3 Fetouh, M. (2016, July 8). Tour du monde inter-religieux avec l’association coexister. Bordeaux Ensemble. https://marikfetouh.com/2016/07/08/tour-du-monde-inter-reli gieux-avec-coexsiter/ 4 Frank Laporte conducted his research on Toulouse Fraternité at the moment I was finishing my fieldwork there. He kindly shared the thesis he wrote for his university diploma with me (Laporte, 2018). We also had the chance to discuss and contrast our findings, which enriched my knowledge of this body. I am thankful for these discussions. 5 Quotation obtained from Alain Juppé’s blog, www.al1jup.com/, no longer available online. 6 As Picard (2017, pp. 4–5) argues, “laïcité has since then [2015] made a place for itself in municipal public controversies but it’s also a pretext to address the issue of Islamic religious practices that are likely to make ‘living together’ in contexts of religious pluralism difficult or represent an obstacle to it”.

Chapter 3

Vivre ensemble and other “urban myths of conviviality”

One striking commonality in the discourse of my interlocutors was that most of them used the notion of vivre ensemble (living together) in the formal interview or in our informal conversations. They used it to refer to many different things and rarely questioned it, assuming that everyone understood its meaning. However, when I asked them what they meant by it, they struggled to define it. Similarly, in personal encounters with regular citizens in the three cities, the idea of vivre ensemble emerged spontaneously. Without me asking much, the idea of vivre ensemble would regularly come up in small talk. In Bordeaux, for example, the owners of the apartment I rented while doing fieldwork indicated the need of living together after the 2015 terrorist attacks. The taxi driver that drove me from Rennes airport to the city centre the night I arrived made a similar comment. This discourse of vivre ensemble or living together is what I call an “urban myth of conviviality” in this chapter (Nagel, 2018, p. 321). From a sociological perspective, cities are not only the material reality of their physical space, but also experiential and discursive products shaped by people’s actions. This chapter focuses on the discursive dimension of the urban governance of religious diversity, that is the construction of narratives and discourses which delimit what is sayable and who can say it (Foucault, 1991). I analyse the social imaginaries that circulate around religious diversity, understood as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (Taylor, 2004, p. 23). How do urban actors talk about and make sense of religious diversity in a context where the term religion is often avoided? Which ideas do they develop around accommodating religion based on the local stocks of knowledge available? How do actors imagine the future of their city and what are their aspirations concerning the coexistence and interaction of religiously diverse groups? By analysing these discourses, I capture the dominant cultural narratives surrounding France’s modern history of relations between the state and the Catholic Church, the origins of the current configuration of the French Republic and the place of religion in social life. These narratives, understood as a representational practice through which a social group, a community or a society represents itself through telling its story, are central to the construction of nations and national

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identities as imagined political communities (Anderson, 1983). They usually focus on past events and run until the present moment, but they may also include utopian ideas about the future (Steinmetz, 1992). In the case of France in particular, state secularism and ideas about the distinction between the religious and other spheres of social life are closely related to the issue of national integration (Wohlrab-Sahr & Burchardt, 2012). How does all this play out in urban contexts? How do understandings of the urban reality, in particular of the place of religion and religious minorities in society, inform policy discourse and practice? How do imaginaries of the city’s past, present and future affect the perception of policy problems and solutions, as well as their discursive framing? My argument in this chapter is that social imaginaries around national and local communities produced in the context of urban life matter. Visions, imaginations and narratives about religion, religious diversity, urban life and the nation are important because they inform policy discourse and the conceptualisation of policy problems. They also justify the resulting policy choices and practices (Hoekstra, 2018), as well as influence their acceptance or rejection by city populations. Do we find similarities or differences across cities in the dominant narratives regarding religious difference and its governance? My research shows that the stories people tell about diversity in their social life and its governance are contextspecific. Different cultural narratives stand out in the three cities of this study that frame how diversity in general, and religious diversity in particular, are understood and addressed publicly. Rennes was often described by my interlocutors as a city where “les choses se passent bien”, that is, where things work well. In doing so, they often tried to separate the situation in their city from more conflictual contexts, with reference to some of the banlieues (social-housing peripheral neighbourhoods) in Paris and general conflictive debates at the national level. An imaginary that Rennes has managed to keep things “peaceful”, where no big riots, conflicts and controversies emerge, seems to prevail. In Bordeaux, the emphasis is put on the historical character of the city’s religious diversity. The wine industry brought a significant number of foreign traders and families with different religious backgrounds. Thus, the presence of Jews and Protestants and an idea of interreligious tolerance are well ingrained in the city’s collective imaginary. In Toulouse, the social imaginary of a city with a long history of integrating immigrant minorities and peaceful coexistence among them also prevails. This is used to frame the violent event of the terrorist attack to the Jewish school as an exception that was impossible to predict. The next sections show all this in greater detail.

“Urban myths of conviviality” in contexts of diversity Myth is “a system of communication” (Barthes, 1972, p. 107) that presents a historical reality as natural by universalising a particular interpretation of the world

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(Münch, 2016). More specifically, “a myth is a narrative created and believed by a group of people which diverts attention away from a puzzling part of their reality” (Yanow, 1996, p. 191). Myths are frequently used in policymaking because they legitimise social order and action, and only emphasise the positive aspects of a society (Münch, 2016). Moreover, because their content is vague, they can be appropriated and used by any social or political actor. The concept of “urban myths of conviviality”, coined by Nagel (2018, p. 321), refers to a series of narratives that circulate in urban contexts in relation to religious diversity. Defined as “affirmative narratives of social cohesion across religious boundaries, as well as programmatic notions of religious conviviality” (Körs & Nagel, 2018, p. 349), urban myths of conviviality do not reflect the reality of the social world. Instead, they project an image that makes the interaction between religious groups in a city appear as natural, normal and positive. Moreover, the concept also refers to programmatic ideas of the convivial understanding and coexistence of religious groups in a concrete territory. The notion of conviviality, often referred to as convivencia or vivre ensemble, has become popular in public discourses and the social sciences, with attention to how people live with one another in diverse urban contexts (Nowicka & Vertovec, 2014). Conviviality refers to routinised interactions that make multiple cultures an ordinary feature of urban life (Gilroy, 2004; Noble, 2013). In this chapter, I focus on how urban actors talk about and make sense of their experiences living with cultural and religious differences. More specifically, I am interested in how vivre ensemble, or conviviality, is used both to naturalise the social situation in a concrete urban context and to refer to programmatic ideas guiding policy action. This is of particular relevance in France, where notions of cultural and religious diversity are contested. While the social reality on the ground is very diverse, ideas about the Republican polity have long denied it (Wihtol de Wenden, 2003). However, diversity discourses have become more prevalent since the beginning of the 2000s, replacing more contested terms, such as ethnic minorities, affirmative action and multiculturalism (Bereni & Jaunait, 2009; Doytcheva, 2010). An early reference to diversity in relation to religion appeared in the 2003 Stasi report related to the application of the principle of laïcité.

The myth of vivre ensemble or living together Urban myths of conviviality appeared repeatedly during my fieldwork in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse, either explicitly or implicitly in interviews, informal conversations, observations and documents. The notion of peaceful vivre ensemble is a recurrent urban myth of conviviality in the three cities. It serves as praise of the social and religious situation in a particular context, as a policy, social principle and aim worth pursuing and maintaining, and as a national value that needs the protection of and promotion by state institutions. Lori G. Beaman (2016, p.  3) calls vivre ensemble a “national mantra”. The term was used in the 2010 parliamentary report of the Mission d’information sur la pratique du port du voile intégral sur le territoire national1 (Information

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Mission on the Practice of the Wearing of the Full Veil in the National Territory) and the 2014 European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) judgement in relation to the prohibition of full-face veils in French public spaces (S.A.S. v. France). The parliamentary report presents vivre ensemble as a French principle of collective life (p. 87), and the use of the full veil as the rejection of fraternity and an attack against the notion of “civility”, both considered key features of French society. Moreover, by referring to its foundation in the period of the Enlightenment (“notre vivre ensemble fondé sur l’Esprit des Lumières”—“our living together based on the Spirit of the Enlightment”, p. 14), the report imbues the term with mythical origins. Moreover, in the report, vivre ensemble implies the possibility of establishing interpersonal interactions that include visual communication with the face: “In a country that has made civility and courtesy a social and even a political value, refusing to exchange with the face uncovered is felt as an attitude of mistrust, rejection or even threat” (p. 19). In the judgement of the ECtHR, which ratified the right of the French government to ban the use of full-face veils in public, there was discordance among the judges. The ECtHR’s majority assessment agreed that the visibility of the face is crucial in interpersonal relations and is considered a basic requirement of life in society to ensure living together and to protect the rights and freedoms of others (Adrian, 2017). The dissenting opinion of two judges questioned that seeing one’s full face is a requirement for interpersonal interaction (para. 9 of the Dissenting Opinion). Moreover, the two judges criticised the vagueness of the term and argued against its use as a principle in court decisions because, according to them, “[t]he very general concept of ‘living together’ does not fall directly under any of the rights and freedoms guaranteed within the Convention”2 (para. 5 of the Dissenting Opinion).3 The document of the French commission and the ECtHR judgement show that the notion of vivre ensemble is vague and thus serves as a general principle that risks being applied in numerous situations and to justify controversial decisions (Adrian, 2017; Tsevas, 2017). In both documents, it refers to some general conception of a society that requires the social norm of interpersonal contact through the visual identification of the face. Yet, beyond the legal and political uses of the term, its social uses are much wider. The term refers to some sense of public order, civility and peaceful interactions between religious groups that prevents conflicts from exploding in urban contexts, and so on. It entails some sense of respect. This can be seen as both an active process of acceptance of diversity or, rather, as Berking and colleagues (2018) put it, as the result of the indifference towards (religious) difference that prevails among the inhabitants of many European cities. Living together: a vague and multifarious notion My interlocutors often referred to vivre ensemble to either describe the social situation of their city or to pose a desideratum for the future. However, they were only

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seldom able to define the term when I asked about the meaning. Edmond Hervé, mayor of Rennes for more than 20 years, sees living together as the main responsibility of a mayor: “This notion of living together is something very important for a mayor. It’s part of his duties”. Interestingly, he links vivre ensemble and laïcité very explicitly when he states: “laïcité consists of organising a vivre ensemble based on our differences, our personal sensibilities, while recognising . . . a common good, a common heritage”. This link between the two was not uncommon in the discourses of my interviewees and policy documents, but remained contested, nonetheless. One interviewee in Rennes, a left-wing politician, questioned that laïcité was given the allencompassing role of ensuring social cohesion. In her view, and that of her political party, “we cannot ask everything to laïcité; it is not laïcité which will arrange everything around living together”. For her, “laïcité is first and foremost the preservation of freedom of all, religious and non-religious people”. This politician asserts secularism as the legal protection of freedom over a conception that equates it with the idea of social cohesion. Similarly, a member of a laicist and atheist association criticised this association between laïcité and vivre ensemble: “[o]ur point of view is not that laïcité is vivre ensemble. For me, ‘living together’ is a Catholic theme, ‘love thy neighbour’”. With this statement, this secularist actor rejects the appropriation and reinterpretation of the idea of laïcité by Catholic actors. In Toulouse, the notion of vivre ensemble acquired special relevance after the 2012 terrorist attack. There, living together is also explicitly linked to laïcité. In a moment when laïcité was not as frequently debated as it is now, there was a decision to create a municipal centre called “Espace Diversités Laïcité” (Space Diversities Laïcité). Municipal employees responsible for this institution, which is in charge of the policy for the fight against discrimination, indicated to me that their task was: “to refocus the debate, to show that laïcité was a theme that allowed to think and live better together within the city”. As shown previously, the term living together is used to refer broadly to laïcité, but it is not fully clear what the actors mean by it. However, vivre ensemble is not only linked to discourses on laïcité; the term is used in many other policy areas. The working documents4 of the Contrat de ville of Rennes—the main municipal policy on urban development, renewal and social cohesion—refer to this term. One of its working axes for a selection of impoverished and marginalised neighbourhoods is to “reinforce living together, fight against withdrawal into oneself and fight against discrimination” (p. 47). Similarly, the Rennes municipal educational plan for the period 2016–2020, entitled “Six ambitions to grow well and become a citizen in Rennes: Educate together to live together . . . in intelligence”, also includes the notion of living together. One of those six axes of action is called “living together around the principles of citizenship, laïcité, the fight of discriminations and for the equality between boys and girls”. In this policy document, schools are conceptualised as “the place where living together and cultural opening, which implies the acceptance of differences and respect for the other, are constructed” (p. 13).5 The actions envisioned include

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classes with secularist associations that allow pupils to appropriate the notions of laïcité and living together, and workshops to promote the national charter of laïcité in schools. The website of the municipality of Bordeaux divides policies along several areas. One of them is called “vivre ensemble” and includes 1) fight against discriminations, 2) equality between men and women, 3) memory, 4) LGBT+, 5) interreligious dialogue, 6) fight against racism and antisemitism, 7) radicalisation, 8) fight against uncivil behaviour and 9) Bordeaux at night. In the description of this area, the website refers to the need to “respect the balance between past, present and future, between structures, equipment and projects, between responsibility, trust and sharing, and all that with humans being the common denominator to build a city in which to live well together”. It goes on to indicate that as a social and solidary city, “Bordeaux engages in favour of social cohesion, solidarity, the search for well-being for everyone and the integration of all into the life of the city”.6 Here, social cohesion stands out in relation to the notion of living together, and religious diversity and interreligious dialogue are just a part of it. The notion of vivre ensemble is also recurrent in Toulouse, including in it local plan to fight discrimination entitled “Plan d’action de prévention et de lutte contre les discriminations, le racisme, l’antisémitisme, la haine anti-LGBT et pour la promotion du vivre-ensemble 2018–2020”7 (“Action Plan to Prevent and Fight Discriminations, Racism, Antisemitism, Anti-LGBT Hatred and for the Promotion of Living Together 2018–2020”). In this case, too, the term remains broad and undefined, and it is used along with other notions such as fraternity, equality and the inclusion of all diversities. Vivre ensemble is used to refer to actions planned to de-stigmatise disabilities, promote laïcité, and to break the “repli sur soi” or “withdrawal into oneself/one’s group” (p. 19). Similarly, the mayor’s introduction in the Contrat de ville Toulouse Métropole 2015–2020 starts with the following statement: “In Toulouse, vivre ensemble is not an empty word”.8 References are made to the need to not marginalise disadvantaged neighbourhoods and sectors of the metropolitan area, which suffer inequalities and carry a negative image. In “Les Assises métropolitaines de la politique de la ville”—the public policy forum held to discuss this policy of social integration before it was approved— supporting living together was presented as “a global challenge”.9 In the case of Toulouse, the 2012 terrorist attack affected the municipal approach to religion and related issues and put the question of living together, whatever each actor would mean by it, at the centre of the political agenda. Municipal employees referred to this when I interviewed them: I know that maybe it [the debate on laïcité in urban political life] was also accelerated following the attacks caused by Mohamed Merah in Toulouse and in Montauban. . . . I think the issue is not the attacks as such but the attacks are a sign of something. .  .  . But the issue that arose is that more and more people all around had discovered that there has been a rise of Salafism in the neighbourhoods, a rise of religious intransigence, not only

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in the neighbourhoods, but a change in attitudes, tensions that appeared in schools, in public services, with municipal employees or elsewhere. And so, the bombing component caused people to themselves re-examine what was around them. . . . It provoked a form of awareness about religious extremism and all that. The vagueness of vivre ensemble discourses is not exclusive to state actors. Religious actors have also appropriated this broad conception, which could be interpreted as a strategy of community groups to engage with authorities (Baumann, 1996). When I asked one Protestant representative in the city of Bordeaux the reason to mention laïcité and vivre ensemble together, this person claimed the principle of respect for alterity, understood not as active recognition, but rather as the right to indifference: Vivre ensemble is the principle of respect of alterity that goes as far as this idea of the brotherly alterity of the Gospel. But I claim to not have to identify the other on the religious basis or on the basis of his or her political ideas when we are in the public sphere. I expect from my contemporaries this vivre ensemble in this public sphere for which we are responsible together, and that we can live without being required to be identified for reasons of homosexuality, to be identified for religious reasons, but to be identified for reasons of citizenship. It is this that is common to us. Vivre ensemble is this citizenship, this responsibility of a society and the values that go with it. In this case, my interlocutor attaches specific ideas, such as the right to indifference and the notion of citizenship, which mirror the notion of “colour-blind Republicanism”. In the series of talks organised by the interreligious association “L’heure du partage: Se connaître pour vivre ensemble” (The Time of Sharing: Knowing Each Other in Order to Live Together), with the support of the municipality of Toulouse, religious actors also use the notion of vivre ensemble. In 2015, this series of events was entitled “What is the place of spiritual communities in our Republic?” Each evening of the series, one of the four religious traditions involved (Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism and Protestantism) would explain its history, traditions, links to French society and “its place within the republican living together”.10 Thus, the notion of living together appears vaguely equivalent to that of “national community”. Similarly, for some years now, in all three cities, interreligious initiatives and civil-society associations have organised, with the support of the respective municipalities, the Journée de la laïcité et du vivre-ensemble. Economic actors have also engaged in discussions around living together. An example of this is the yearly event Vivre ensemble. Les assises nationales de la citoyenneté (Living Together. The National Conference on Citizenship), which is organised by the regional newspaper Ouest-France in collaboration with the Rennes municipality

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and other partners since 2018. In all these cases, vivre ensemble remains a vague term. It stands as a sort of placeholder for various concerns of social life. The term vivre ensemble is often qualified in the French contexts referring to bien vivre ensemble, that is, “living together well”. This implies a strong normative component that assumes that it is not enough that (religiously) diverse populations live next to each other, but that they do so in a “good” way. It is not the indifference Berking et al. (2018) refer to, but rather an active acceptance of “the other”—or rather an acceptance of the established norms of civility. The discourse of living together requires an effort on the part of religious groups, and in particular Islam, to be open and transparent, to have nothing to hide (Amiraux, 2014, 2016) and to be willing to cooperate with other religious groups and social actors. As Beaman puts it (2016, p. 4), despite its “rhetorical appeal”, “[l]iving together, though, has become a code through which religious minorities are expected to comply with ‘our values’”. That is, despite its positive tone and inclusionary vocabulary, from a Foucauldian perspective, the discourse of living together entails more or less explicit assumptions about acceptable social behaviour and the resulting exclusionary practices. Living together: “things go well here” Urban actors in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse see the situation of living together without many problems as a particularity of their city; they signal that the social context of interactions between people and groups of different cultural and religious backgrounds happens smoothly there. The phrase “things go well here” was not uncommon in my interviews. A former deputy mayor in charge of relations with religious groups in Rennes put it more precisely: You know, in Rennes, I could have that role and it was not too bad because there was still a climate of trust between Muslims, Buddhists, because we should not forget other religions, like Protestant evangelical religions. There was a climate of trust with the municipality and that sometimes helps to avoid problems. With this assertion, she assesses the formal relations between the municipality and religious organisations positively. Moreover, she stresses their distinctively Rennois character, something which she reinforces as she continues characterising the situation of the city: It’s a city where everyone . . . I do not know how many nationalities there are, I do not know how many religions there are, but we do not have religious wars in Rennes.11 That does not mean that there are no problems, that there are no sectarian excesses in this or that religion, I don’t mean that. But, globally, we are not on a radicalised city in the sense of religion. This is also the case because when there is a problem, people discuss it.

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In her view, Rennes not only managed to host nationally and religiously diverse populations, but did so in a peaceful way, fostered by a tradition of dialogue. Similarly, the deputy mayor in charge of citizenship in the municipality of Bordeaux referred to the situation in his city as somewhat distinct, where things are pacified: I think we are lucky in Bordeaux to be in a city that is quite appeased and it is because it is so peaceful that we can do this interreligious dialogue so thoroughly. I think there are cities where it would lead to riots; it would be complicated to open a mosque or a synagogue. I think that in Bordeaux there is not necessarily a very important issue [related to religious diversity], in the sense that it is going relatively well and we try to make sure that it continues to go well, despite a national context that is a difficult context. I think the challenge is to maintain this vivre ensemble in Bordeaux despite a national context that is unfavourable. Along the same lines, a civil-society activist involved in interreligious dialogue and other related activities in that city refers to the situation there as a “microclimate, a rather serene atmosphere”, “our climate is a bit different from that which we hear or see in a number of cities where there are tensions”. The two actors stress the specific and positive atmosphere in Bordeaux, while the politician also highlights the action of the municipality to prevent the negative effects of external influences that disturb the city. As it has become clear, there is a sense of pride in how things happen in particular urban contexts. Bell and de-Shalit (2016, p. 4) coined the term “urban pride” to refer to the fact that urban citizens are proud of the way of life in their city and eager to promote its particular identity. This ethos, or set of values generally shared by their inhabitants, allows cities to counter homogenising pressures of the nation-state and globalisation. These urban myths appear as a form of distinction among cities, where one’s own city is considered “special” because it does not correspond with narratives of social conflict and disintegration that often dominate public and political discussions. With these urban pride discourses, actors of different sorts and orientations in my study try to promote a specific image and identity of their city. However, this perception of a rather peaceful context of urban social interactions is not the only element that forms this sense of pride. Some urban actors, particularly those closer to the political power, express a sense of pride in the policy action of the municipal government related to religion and secularism, and to diversity and immigrant integration more broadly. A member of the municipal government in Rennes assessed the city’s approach to these issues positively: “there is always a strong sensitivity in Rennes regarding issues of laïcité, globally, without any real problem” and continued indicating that they believed that it was “the policy of vivre ensemble in many domains, including education and social policy, but also in relation to laïcité” that makes things work well. This politician

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provides a more concrete example of how this policy is perceived to contribute to living together: The challenge is to continue to live well together. I think that religious groups feel that they are recognised very strongly by the municipality as being important actors of the city, among many others. I think that’s the case, including their presence in the Comité consultatif laïcité. I think they feel that it is a form of recognition from the municipality. There is a sense of the distinctiveness of, and pride in, the city’s handling of these topics, while there is also awareness of its imperfections, as this same politician told me. A similar perception is present in Bordeaux. For its mayor, Bordeaux can become “a French example due to . . . its quality of life and its model of living well together”.12 With this statement, the mayor presents the city and its policies as an example for the rest of France. In line with my findings, Malogne-Fer (2019b, p.  151) argues that urban politicians perceive the policy instrument of Bordeaux Partage as a source of prestige not only towards the local population but also towards the broader French public. In this sense, the city approach, as represented by Bordeaux Partages, may be used as an element to brand the city as an attractive place to live and its policy as a model of “good governance”. By representing them not only as attractive places but also as distinct from other cities, interreligious dialogue, next to cultural, economic and diversity policies, can play a role in branding cities (Hassen & Giovanardi, 2018; Jensen, 2007). Referring to heated national debates that are absent locally strengthens this distinctiveness of the city’s situation and political approach. As the politician in Rennes mentioned previously put it, the provision of menus without pork in the city’s schools was an uncontroversial reality already in the early 1980s, while that was not the case at the national level. In his own words: There is always a lot of talk at the national level, the media make a lot of noise around the problem of menus without pork at school. . . . Already in 1983 there were menus without pork [in Rennes], but we have never talked about that and that was never a problem. No one ever posed a problem and it has always happened naturally. The same happened with the veil and other issues. There have never been big problems in Rennes, which is quite revealing of the fact that in Rennes we are in an inclusive secularism. It has always been first and foremost inclusive secularism. Interestingly, the use of the term “naturally” in this statement indicates a perception that the way Rennes handles things is embedded in the modus operandi of the city. Moreover, the use of the notion of “inclusive secularism” (laïcité inclusive)—often dismissed by some secularist actors for qualifying and therefore discrediting the “real” meaning of the term (“there is no positive or negative laïcité,

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there is laïcité, full stop. There is the 1905 law, full stop”, one secularist actor assured me)—indicates a distancing from approaches that restrict public expressions of religion more severely. This distancing from what Kuru (2007) has called “assertive secularism” is also reinforced by one of the municipal bureaucrats responsible for the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes. In relation to the mandate of drafting a municipal charter of laïcité, he affirmed his preference for some sort of manifesto of the will to living together, of willing to make society each of us and collectively, each of us and all of us together, a sort of very open call in order not to remain only in the coercive dimension of laïcité. By doing so, he distances his work and that of the municipality from prevailing policy choices at the national level that limit public religious expressions. Municipal actors often present their cities as “pioneers” (Young & Connelly, 1981) in the implementation of successful policies and practices, a branding strategy labelled “policy boosterism” (McCann, 2013). Particularly for politicians and other city officials, being the creative and innovative city that had the idea of doing things differently and better first is an asset. They assume that being entrepreneurial will give them a competitive advantage in relation to other cities (Jensen, 2007). This emerged very clearly in my research in Rennes. The same public official saw the construction of “cultural” places for religious minorities by the municipality in this way: “things have been on this avantgarde side, if I may say so”. Similarly, the mayor of Rennes indicated in an interview in a regional newspaper in 2017 that “[t]here is a Rennes history and tradition around laïcité, as well as an ability to innovate”.13 This puts Rennes in a distinctive and privileged position compared to other cities. I develop this further in Chapter 5, where I reflect on how the view of Rennes’ approach as exemplary led to the nomination of its mayor as member of the national Observatoire de la laïcité. Religious actors also share this positive assessment of the way in which things are publicly addressed in Rennes, particularly the promotion of vivre ensemble. A Buddhist representative told me that the fact that there was a space of exchange like the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes, where everyone could share their views and “agree on what the citizens in Rennes can have as a common denominator to live together”, was a good sign of how things are handled in the city. Her positive assessment of this policy instrument proves how easily religious representatives themselves internalise the discourse of the municipality: The committee seems to me to be a very, very important step because, as you have seen, it is very diverse, there are representatives of religions, representatives of associations, experts. All of this gets mixed. It’s a positive energy because when we work together, rather than judge each other, we can only advance. There we are together and we advance together.

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The myth of vivre ensemble—referring either to a social reality or a political project—is a powerful one. While there is a sense of the collective construction of an inclusive society, its vagueness allows conceptualising practically anything as potentially threatening social cohesion. Moreover, it renders legitimacy to any measure ensuring living together that may otherwise sound problematic or enjoy little popular support. Simultaneously, this discourse serves to brand each city as a place to live well, and as a pioneer and inclusive in its public handling of religious diversity.

Similar myths, different historical narratives While actors in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse see their city as particularly convivial, where things go well, or at least not as badly as in other cities, we can trace different historical narratives that sustain this myth. This finding is in line with the work of Barbehön et al. (2016), who argue that urban imaginaries are city-specific because the context shapes how problems are constructed and given meaning. Urban imaginaries reflect the ways in which inhabitants imagine their city, not only in the present, but also in relation to the past and to how things ought to be in the future (Huyssen, 2008; Mah, 2012). Therefore, it is important to understand how inhabitants draw on shared patterns of interpretation and discursive constructions of diversity to make sense of their experience with culturally and religiously diverse “others” (Barbehön et al., 2015; Barbehön & Münch, 2016). Representations of Rennes as a welcoming city, of Bordeaux as a tolerant city and of Toulouse as the city of conviviality appear in slogans of the official communication of cities, both in descriptive and in normative and aspirational terms (Jensen, 2007). City-specific imaginaries, though, can be found in non-official, ordinary discourses, too. Rennes: a welcoming city with internal diversity Two widely known official mottos among the Rennes population are Bretagne, terre d’accueil—used also in the touristic merchandise of the region—and Rennes, vivre en intelligence—the slogan of municipal communications during my fieldwork. They both reflect an imagination of the place as welcoming and open to others, as well as a place that fosters education, innovation and research, and where people live together. A historical reference to its experience with migration and to its particularity as a regional minority culture in France feature in this urban imaginary. First, an idea prevails that, since Rennes and the Bretagne more generally were lands of emigration in the past, they now, as lands of immigration, should be welcoming to foreigners. This moral duty to others is used as a justification of sorts, which fills the self-understanding of the city with pride and its policies as welcoming and open to “the other”. Moreover, a long history of immigration, which includes, among others, Spanish Civil War refugees, Portuguese

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and Maghrebi economic immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s, and Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s (Morillon & Etiemble, 2008), also prevails in the imaginaries of inhabitants. This memory of migration was reflected in and nurtured by an exhibition in the Musée de la Bretagne in 2013 entitled “Migrations: Brittany-World”. The objective of this exhibition was: “To introduce to the public a piece of Breton history that is little known, that of migratory movements—emigration and immigration—from the 19th century to the 21st century”.14 This imaginary of a land of migration emerged recurrently in my interviews: “Breton territory was always open because of the migrant influxes.  .  . . Bretagne is an identity and this contact [with immigrants] was favourable for living together well”. Moreover, as a region with a minority language and culture within France, Bretagne brags about its awareness towards other minorities. This situation provides discursive repertoires for the recognition of other minority cultures. During a Municipal Council meeting that I attended in November 2015, representatives of some left- and centre-wing municipal party factions indicated that “recognising the Breton language is also a way of recognising the diversity of the cultures and languages of Rennes”. One could argue that the internal diversity that the region represents in the rather culturally homogenised France generates a context that is more prone to the appreciation of newer forms of diversity. In other words, the history of emigration of Brittons and later of immigration on the one hand, and its higher awareness towards the recognition of cultural minorities on the other hand, provide cultural references for an urban imaginary of different people living together well. Bordeaux: an open, peaceful and tolerant city In Bordeaux, four historical narratives feature in its self-representation as a place of vivre ensemble. First, big trade cities like Bordeaux have a long history of contact and openness to outsiders. This stance has also been reported for other European harbour cities like Amsterdam: “[i]ts historical tolerance of religious and ethnic diversity can be viewed as the result of a capitalist and entrepreneurial mentality” (Hoekstra, 2018, p.  368). References to this openness as a port city were made in both my conversations with urban actors and in policy documents. More specifically, allusions to the religious diversity linked to the wine industry and trade generate a very powerful cultural narrative—reproduced by historical research, too (Poussou, 2010)—of its historical character. More recent and lessaffluent immigrant groups (Borde & Barrère, 1978), while also significant in the configuration of the city population, occupy a less prominent position in these dominant narratives. Second, allusions to two figures of Bordeaux’s past—Montesquieu and Montaigne—associated with a tradition of religious tolerance are made to refer to the current situation in the city (Malogne-Fer, 2019b). This cultural narrative of a tolerant city also prevails in some policy documents and discourses of urban

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actors. In the municipal Pacte de cohésion sociale et territorial (Pact for Social and Territorial Cohesion), the mayor states that Bordeaux can be a model because we are fortunate to have been able to, for three centuries, lean on a long humanist tradition, a ‘savoir faire’ à la bordelaise that has created a desire to live together and build tomorrow in dialogue and appeasement. This is our footprint. The document goes on to add even magical elements: The climate of social peace that predominates in Bordeaux is due to the DNA of the city, its history, its culture, its humanist tradition, its geographical condition, its urbanism . . . and, as for all alchemy, to a bit of mystery. (Mairie de Bordeaux, 2014, p. 10) One interviewee, a civil-society activist, reinforced this idea of the exceptional situation of Bordeaux, referring to the general atmosphere in the city and its intellectual legacy: “there is a quite particular climate that I find very positive as citizen, people attached to the roots, be it Montesquieu or Montaigne, that is [roots] of tolerance, of temperance”. Third, next to this positive picture, the memory of Bordeaux as a slavery harbour in the colonial period also creates a sense of duty of reparation, or at least recognition of that period. This translates into policies such as cultural initiatives to recover the memory of slavery. In 2005, the city of Bordeaux created the Comité de reflexion et de propositions sur la traite des noirs à Bordeaux (Reflection and Proposals Committee on the Slave Trade in Bordeaux), the work of which was further pursued by the Commission de réflexion sur la traite négrière et l’esclavage (Commission of Reflection on the Slave Trade and Slavery), created in 2016.15 Since 2009, a permanent exhibition on slavery is displayed at the regional Musée d’Aquitaine in Bordeaux. These policies present the recuperation of the memory as a contribution to living together (Augustin, 2012) and establish a discursive rupture and a distinction between that past and the present.16 Finally, since the mid-2000s, Bordeaux has adopted diversity as a paradigm for its policies on immigrant integration and socio-cultural heterogeneity. This turn can partly be understood as being influenced by the 2005–2006 stay of Alain Juppé, mayor between 1995 and 2019 (except between 2005 and 2006), in Quebec (Le Bart, 2009), where he experienced other approaches to diversity. This influence is visible in the transformation of the former Conseil des communautés étrangères created in 2002 into the Conseil bordelaise de la diversité in 2006 (Malogne-Fer, 2019b), and in the yearly celebration of the Quinzaine de l’égalité, de la diversité et de la citoyenneté (Fortnight of Equality, Diversity and Citizenship) since 2014. One member of Juppé’s government told me in an interview in 2016 that this stay in Quebec and the contact with different policies there had an impact on the mayor’s approach to diversity, a narrative that also featured in the

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discourse of various urban actors I interviewed. I develop this further in Chapter 5, where I discuss how policy ideas and tools travel across geographical contexts. Toulouse: the city of convivencia In Toulouse, two historical and cultural narratives about its openness to diversity predominate. An invitation extended by the municipality to the inhabitants to attend a participatory meeting to discuss the “Plan Convivencia” policy summarised the two. The Plan Convivencia is a public policy that is part of the metropolitan Contrat de Ville 2015–2020 public policy on urbanism and social cohesion. The topics that were discussed in the meeting that took place in May 2018 were 1) “Toulouse, a city that has always been open: Bridges with the Arab-Andalusian world” and 2) “What is convivencia? What are the ‘unifying values’ of Toulouse?” In relation to the first, the Plan Convivencia presents the city as having always been open to cultural diversity. This is partly linked to its history of immigration, including the arrival of Italian and Polish immigrants and especially refugees from the Spanish Civil War in the first half of the 20th century, and later Portuguese and Algerians, among other nationalities (Alted & Domergue, 2003; Teulières & Souchet, 2008). There is a widely held discourse, also among my research participants, of the historical character of conviviality between people of different origins. The long history of immigration and integration of these people is often presented as an explanation of the peaceful coexistence until the attack in 2012. In relation to the second, there is an assumption that Toulouse has some specific values that unite the population and generate social cohesion. Similar to Rennes, the regional culture serves as a symbolic and discursive resource to address current issues of social cohesion. The Plan Convivencia features Occitan culture and its values as the resource to strengthen social cohesion and improve the lives of inhabitants, including in priority neighbourhoods. It is a matter of leaning on these values transmitted by the Occitan culture for eight centuries to develop actions within the framework of the “Politique de la ville”. “Convivencia” refers to the art of living together respecting otherness, the balance of social relations within a plural city.17 Occitan identity is seen as helping overcome social cleavages. The central aim of this Plan Convivencia is “to restore social cohesion at the city level building on the ancestral values of Occitan culture”. In sum, despite sharing the myth of conviviality or vivre ensemble, urban imaginaries around religion and diversity more broadly in the three cities are inspired by city-specific historical narratives and meaning-making practices. These draw on the cities’ discourses of the past and project an idea of the potential that those local conditions provide for ensuring a peaceful and cohesive urban society in the future. These symbolic frameworks not only inform and justify policymaking

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and the discursive repertoires available to inhabitants to make sense of their lives. They also serve to build a unique identity that distinguishes each city and presents it as a model of conviviality and good governance.

The threat of communautarisme: an “urban spectre of social fracture” Myths of conviviality, like the one on vivre ensemble just discussed, work in parallel to other narratives that refer to non-conviviality, social fracture or social disintegration. These notions are conviviality’s “dichotomous ‘other’” (Nowicka & Vertovec, 2014, p.  350) because they work in opposition to the idea of vivre ensemble. One such example are the notions of “communautarisme”,18 “risque communautaire”, “répli communautaire” and “repli sur soi”, all of them referring to what Bowen (2010, p. 156) has translated as communalism or “folding in”. I refer to them as an “urban spectre of social fracture”. In contrast to urban myths of conviviality, these discourses present the communalist dimension of religion, particularly in its more visible forms and mostly in relation to Islam, as a threat to living together and incompatible with peaceful collective life. They evidence the uneasiness with ideas of social bodies, such as religious communities, that mediate the relationship between citizens and the state in France. What is seen as the development of ethnic or religious communities closed towards themselves is interpreted as a sign of the disloyalty to the Republic. Therefore, “by making ‘communitarianism’ the generic and symbolic name of the threat, a rhetoric of nationalist struggle is fostered in favour of the unitary ideal” (Dhume, 2010, n.p.).19 The use of the concept communautarisme has spread since the 1990s, but its meanings have adopted different nuances. In his analysis of written media, Fabrice Dhume (2010) identifies a discursive shift after 2001 in which communalism is increasingly related to integration, laïcité, the Republic, the nation, and the link between Islam and security. Similarly, in 2004, the discussions on the Islamic veil in public schools intensified the use of the term; it increasingly articulates a nationalist discourse. While, initially, communautarisme was used to distinguish the French model of integration from the Anglo-Saxon approach to cultural diversity, it more and more refers to a supposed “crisis of integration”. The focus has thus shifted from a distinction with an outsider reference—the Anglo-Saxon model—to an internal threat that reinforces integrationist ideas (Dhume, 2010, n.p.). This discourse works with binary oppositions between “communities”, “fragmentation” and “isolated forms of living” on the one hand, and the unity of the nation and living together in society on the other. Moreover, because France’s secularity is mostly grounded on ideas of national integration (Wohlrab-Sahr & Burchardt, 2012), highly visible expressions of religion are perceived as challenging that secularity and, hence, the very idea of the nation. But how do urban actors relate and contribute to this discourse?

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Many of my interlocutors recurrently used the notion of communautarisme in their discourses, with more direct references among those with conservative ideological leanings. They see cities as the scenario to prevent the development of separated and closed communities in society. In contemporary France, these discourses mostly refer to the “social closure” of communities, the fear of radicalisation of young Muslim men, in particular in marginal neighbourhoods, and their detachment from their social environment. One Toulouse city official explained to me that the tasks of Toulouse Fraternité is to fight this risk among the youth: What we also want is to try to go to high schools and colleges, religious and non-religious actors together, precisely to carry a message of understanding, of culture, of appeasement also with young people, to try to make them understand that we are in a democracy, that we must preserve democracy, that is, against precisely the temptations of excessive communautarisme. A conservative politician that I interviewed in Rennes also referred to the formation of parallel societies, even if she did not mention the term communautarisme at this point in the interview. Similar to the previous quotation, she sees the Comité consultatif laïcité as having an educational role, in particular with Muslim families, to create more social proximity. However, she is sceptical that this can happen: How can we be in proximity with people who tend to, not marginalise themselves, because the term does not quite fit but, in any case, certainly to live a little on the side? . . . I do not feel that in today’s France Muslims live with non-Muslims. I think the problem is there, because there has been stigma for a very long time. In some cities, we have tolerated practices that are out of date, and we should not have done so. I tend to say, but that’s probably my political opinion, that we do it for questions of electioneering and that today, in some neighbourhoods, in some cities in the suburbs of Paris, we live as we should not live in France, and that’s intolerable. It is interesting that in this quotation, beyond the reference to the formation of side-by-side communities, there is the allusion to Paris, implicitly indicating that this negative situation does not take place as much in Rennes. However, discourses on communautarisme and related expressions do not just refer to the risk of radicalisation and the formation of parallel societies. They also delegitimise specific requests of minority groups, which are seen as too demanding. The same city official in Toulouse alluded to communautarisme when referring to discussions held in Toulouse Fraternité around the use of female Islamic religious symbols: Personally, but there I will not impose my vision. . . . I am still against, if you will, the too ostentatious signs of communautarisme, whatever they may be.

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I do not agree either, I’m honest with you, when rabbis are walking with kippot, I do not agree. It’s their right to walk around. But I do not like there to be a form of, that they form . . . I’m afraid that their outfit and their behaviour to each other will agitate, cause hatred, resentment, and then everything we know that follows thereafter, you see, clash. That is when you show too much communitarianism, excessive if you will. More broadly, minority claims, particularly those coming from Islamic groups, are perceived as challenging the unity of the nation (Montague, 2013). Religious demands are seen as a confrontation with ideas of the Republic and the nation. The conservative politician in Rennes mentioned previously also referred to communautarisme to reject what she perceives as exceptional claims for recognition of public practices of Muslims, which she contrasts with her “private” religious practices: These populations . . . they tend to develop this communautarisme. We are not a Muslim community next to a Catholic community. We are French people. I would not consider presenting myself as a Catholic. It is very curious. I am French and my religion is my problem; it’s something that happens in the private sphere, in my intimacy, in my family. It doesn’t concern anyone else. I do not pretend to impose onto society to assume the obligations that my religion would give me. Similarly, for a secularist actor I interviewed in Rennes, the demands of some Muslim groups for a confessional plot in the municipal cemetery are not only impossible to satisfy under the 1905 law but, more importantly, also “a very precise sign of communautarisme”. For him, “laïcité is anti-communautarisme, it’s the contrary of communautarisme”. And yet, while he and his organisation consider that the main problem in relation to laïcité is with the public funding of Catholic schools (according to the 1959 Debré law on the relationship between the state and private schools), he only uses the term communitarianism to refer to the claims of that religious minority and not to those of the majority religion. Religious leaders sometimes use the term communautarisme, even if not referring to Muslims explicitly. As one protestant pastor in Bordeaux told me: In my opinion, this vivre ensemble today is conditioned by our capacity not to be in communautarisme, but in a community of humanity and of democratic values and the values of the Republic. This quotation, juxtaposing communautarisme and a community of humanity, democracy and the Republic, indicates the incompatibility of communitarianism, whatever it may imply, with the Republic. In other words, some minority religious expressions and claims for public recognition are seen as challenging the

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supposedly universal and neutral public space. Collective practices and forms of identification that reflect group particularities are deemed to threaten conviviality because they undermine the commonalities shared in a society. From a critical perspective, the communautarisme discourse can be understood as a disciplinary practice (Montague, 2013); it legitimises certain policies and behaviours that restrain individual and collective religious practices deemed incompatible with the social conception of the French polity. By labelling certain practices as communalist, this discourse discredits and discourages them and marks them as deviant social behaviour. However, this discourse is not uncontested. One left-wing politician in Rennes expressed her concerns in this regard. She disagreed with a vision of laïcité that equates the public expression of religiosity with a threat to the Republic. She criticises the assumption that not being neutral in one’s clothes, eating habits, etc., could “threaten the Republic, it would become indecent and indecorous”. In her opinion, an approach to laïcité that wants to make the public space, and not simply state institutions, religiously neutral becomes a moral interpretation of secularism. For her, a moralising use of laïcité to discourage the public expression of one’s religiosity because of its threatening potential is not appropriate.

Conclusion This chapter has drawn attention to the discursive and narrative dimension of governance in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse. As argued by interpretative approaches to policy analysis, cities are not only material and spatial configurations, but also spaces of experiences and meaning-making. Drawing on the discourses of my interlocutors, I have examined the dominant narratives and myths that underlie and frame policy approaches to religious diversity, with especial attention to the myth of conviviality of vivre ensemble and the spectre of social fracture of communautarisme or répli communautaire. References to social cohesion and living together are used to describe a desired future, but also partly the current social situation and policy approaches in the cities. To the contrary, communautarisme is used to refer to social behaviours considered threatening to that situation of living together and to the values and idea of the French Republic more broadly. However, despite the positive connotation of the living together discourse, both discourses have a disciplining character. Certain forms of doing, behaving and relating to each other are presented as characteristic of each city and constituting its identity, thereby excluding those which do not conform to those parameters. By establishing what is perceived as good social behaviour and interactions, and discrediting those that are deemed unacceptable and incompatible with the “norms and values” of the society, the dominant discourses of vivre ensemble and communautarisme contribute to the governmentality of minority populations, particularly Muslims, using Foucault’s terms.

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The chapter has also shown that Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse share the general myth of vivre ensemble, both as a description of their current situation as well as a desideratum for the future. This can result from a discourse spreading in a top-down manner from the national and European to urban contexts. However, the sources of inspiration and justification that nurture those discourses are, to a certain extent, particular to each individual city. Historical narratives build on memories of past experiences and urban imaginaries crafted around the specific social configuration of the urban population. References to Rennes and Bretagne’s past as a land of emigration, and a regional awareness of minority languages and cultures, are used to praise dominant framings of diversity and justify a duty of welcoming “the other” in the present. In Bordeaux, a cultural narrative of the historical character of its religious diversity and a legacy of tolerance extended in its current diversity policy conflict and interact with a memory of slavery in an attempt to create a compelling narrative. Finally, in Toulouse, a history of immigration from various regions, and references to the regional culture as a source of social cohesion, nourish the city’s myth of conviviality. These dominant discourses have managed to establish themselves as the most evident self-representations of each city. Yet, they are not uncontested. The communautarisme discourse, as a spectre of social fracture, is also common to all three cities. Here, too, a national discourse has spread over cities. Communautarisme becomes an “obsessive figure” considered to be a big threat to the very foundation of French society (Dhume, 2010, n.p.). By discrediting what are perceived as threats to the unity of the nation, the discourse establishes the conditions of belonging to the nation, just as the vivre ensemble discourse does. Yet, its articulation differs because actors referred to communalism as happening mostly outside of their cities, with recurrent references to the Paris banlieues—often portrayed in media and public discourse as dangerous territories outside of state control (Hargreaves, 1996; Wacquant, 2005). On a theoretical note, whether cities share their myths of conviviality and social fracture or not, whether the sources that inspire them are shared or not, and whether the discourses reflect the actual situation or not is not the most revealing aspect of the empirical material. More importantly, the analysis shows that these discourses around rather vague terms serve urban actors across a variety of domains: first, to make sense of their most immediate environment; second, to present and brand their city as distinct from, and better than, others as one to be proud of; third, to project an aspiration of a better future; fourth, to find a justification for existing policies and moral positioning; and, finally, to reinforce the contours of social acceptance and belonging to the urban and, ultimately, the national communities. It is precisely their vagueness that makes them suitable for so many actors and their different purposes. Just as with the notion of laïcité, which so often these discourses of living together and communalism replace, everyone agrees on them, even if everyone disagrees on their meaning. Dominant discourses allow for ideological plasticity and thus serve a wide range of ideological

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positions (Baumann, 1996; Bowen, 2007). In this sense, vivre ensemble and communautarisme have become “empty signifiers” (Laclau, 1996, p. 36) that have the capacity to represent multiple, and even opposing, interests as a cohesive totality (Piñeiro & Haller, 2012). Methodologically, this approach to imaginaries and discourses runs the risk of essentialising cities and presenting them as a unique social and discursive reality. However, I am not arguing that only local conditions matter for how discourses and narratives around religious diversity and its governance are built. Discourses at regional, national and international levels influence the range of references available. However, the ways people understand and experience the world around them are mediated by stocks of localised knowledge and discourses informed by specific contexts, memories and social configurations. City-specific narratives build not only on understandings of the city’s present reality, but also of its history of migration and religious diversity, and of its future and how urban actors imagine it in relation to this heterogeneity.

Notes 1 Guerin, A., & Raoult, É. (2010). Rapport au nom de la Mission d’information sur la pratique du port du voile intégral sur le territoire national. Assemblée Nationale. www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/pdf/rap-info/i2262.pdf 2 The European Convention of Human Rights. 3 For a more thorough analysis of the case and its gendered dimension, see Beaman (2016). 4 Mairie de Rennes. (2017). Rapport annuel du contrat de ville de la métropole rennaise 2016–2017. https://metropole.rennes.fr/sites/default/files/file-PolPub/Contrat_ de_Ville_-_Rapport_annuel_2016-2017.pdf 5 Ville de Rennes. (2016). Project Éducatif Local de la Ville de Rennes 2016–2020: Six ambitions pour bien grandir et devenir citoyen à Rennes. Éduquer ensemble, pour vivre ensemble . . . En intelligence. https://rennesvilleeducatrice2016.files.wordpress. com/2016/12/pel-rennes-2016-2020.pdf 6 Mairie de Bordeaux. (2020). Bordeaux vivre ensemble. Site officiel de la ville de Bordeaux. www.bordeaux.fr/p80993/bordeaux-vivre-ensemble 7 Mairie de Toulouse. (2018). Plan d’action de prévention et de lutte contre les discriminations, le racisme, l’antisémitisme, la haine anti-LGBT et pour la promotion du vivre-ensemble 2018–2020. www.toulouse.fr/documents/4171884/11115605/planDis crim.pdf/9a5a56e2-5c86-44b0-9a46-3a1cdd45fbe9 8 Toulouse Métropole. (2015). Le contrat de ville de Toulouse Métropole 2015–2020. www.toulouse.fr/documents/6022456/6024308/PlaquetteContratDeVille.pdf/ cafc20f4-d9cf-4560-b98d-bdd2a25180c4 9 Toulouse Métropole. (2015). Les Assises métropolitaines de la politique de la ville. Pour un meilleur partage des principes de laïcité: Soutenir les espaces d’échanges, aider à la reconnaissance réciproque, accompagner les professionnels. www.toulouse.fr/documents/6022456/6024312/MeilleurPartagePrincipesLaicite.pdf/54d8ff36f2f0-4f21-9853-6d7c4e8cba94 10 L’heure du partage. (2015). Quelle est la place des communautés spirituelles dans notre république? https://blogs.univ-tlse2.fr/benoit-petit/files/2015/05/HeurePartageFlyer-cycle-avril-juin.pdf 11 Emphasis is mine.

78  Vivre ensemble 12 Mairie de Bordeaux. (2014). Empreinte et mutations: Vers un PACTE de cohésion sociale et territoriale. Site officiel de la ville de Bordeaux. https://es.calameo.com/ read/001480121905023abb922 13 Le Télégramme. (2017, April 11). Nathalie Appéré. PS:  “Il y aura des enseignements à tirer de la campagne ”. Le Telegramme. www.letelegramme.fr/bretagne/nathalie-appereps-il-y-aura-des-enseignements-a-tirer-de-la-campagne-11-04-2017-11470557.php 14 Musée de Bretagne. (2013). Migrations: Bretagne-Monde. Musée de Bretagne. www. musee-bretagne.fr/musee-et-collections/publications/autres-formats/migrations/ 15 Mairie de Bordeaux. (2018). Commission de réflexion sur la traite négrière et l’esclavage. Site officiel de la ville de Bordeaux. www.bordeaux.fr/p114617/commission-dereflexion-sur-la-traite-negriere-et-l-esclavage 16 For an in-depth critical assessment of these policies, see Forsdick (2012), Frith (2013) and Hourcade (2012). 17 Ville de Toulouse. (2017). Plan Convivencia. https://www.toulouse.fr/en_US/web/ la-mairie/toulouse-l-occitane/plan-convivencia 18 I use the English translations of communalism and communitarianism interchangeably. 19 My own translation from the original in French.

Chapter 4

Re-shaping laïcité How urban secularism defines religious normality

On 25 February 2016, I attended a meeting of the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes where members discussed whether prayer should be allowed during working hours. Some suggested that prayer could be allowed as long as it would not bother co-workers, although they had difficulty establishing what “discomfort” could mean; for others this was a matter of labour regulations on which the committee had no say. One specific question was whether municipal gardeners should be allowed to pray during lunch breaks in outdoor spaces. On this, a consensus emerged quite rapidly: it should not be allowed because, as uniformed public employees, these gardeners had to respect state neutrality. It is clear from the outset that this discussion was all about Muslim employees and that, in the minds of the committee members, prayer would involve genuflexion. This bodily practice performed wearing the uniform of the municipal garden company was dismissed as not only breaking the legally required neutrality of the state, but also as representing an ostentatious practice. “If they want to pray like that it’s because they have not understood that prayer in Islam can also be done privately”, one member of the committee commented. “Everyone knows that religious practices can be done discretely. If one understands prayer correctly, one can do it internally without it being noticeable for anyone else”, indicated another member. And yet another member added “praying can be done at home”. While this case did not raise much controversy among participants, it does show the capacity of municipal actors to draw the boundaries of that which is considered acceptable in public (Martínez-Ariño & Griera, 2020). Moreover, it indicates that certain practices, namely those that are considered too pious or too visible, are deemed unacceptable, whereas those considered private—such as individual prayer in silence—are considered appropriate. Through policies and discourses arising from discussions like these, urban actors shape what state secularism means and looks like, and the implications this has for the actual practice of religion. Three main questions arise. First, how do city actors define religious “normality” and how do urban interventions matter to the practice of religion? Second, how do city responses and discourses differ from those at the national level? Can we sustain the often-assumed clear-cut distinction between urban as pragmatic and national as politicised or ideological approaches

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to difference? And third, how do urban policies, actors and normative ideas about religion and secularism reshape the meaning of grand laïcité narratives and ultimately re-define the boundaries of belonging to the nation? In pursuing these questions, I draw on the concept of multilevel governance, understood as the interaction between different political and administrative levels of the state and supranational institutions, and the horizontal interaction of actors with different degrees and types of power in the making of public policies (Betsill & Bulkeley, 2006; Scholten, 2013; Zincone & Caponio, 2006). This perspective challenges assumptions that top-down processes and national models of church-state relations determine governance of religious diversity and instead shows that policymaking is done at different levels and spheres simultaneously. It captures the inputs of lower levels of policymaking into upper levels (Zincone & Caponio, 2006), and has not been deployed consistently in empirical studies of the governance of religious diversity. Two exceptions are the work of Joseph Downing (2015) and Tuomas Martikainen (2013), who take into account the role of multiple actors and political, territorial and administrative tiers involved in the governance of religion. Their work on France and Finland, respectively, shows that policies regulating religion beyond formal state-church relations increasingly develop through the work of multiple actors located in different levels. To a great extent, my analysis draws on the participant observations I conducted in the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes over a period of eight months while the project of the Charte de la laïcité was being discussed and drafted. Being present in those meetings allowed me to capture the implicit assumptions and informal conversations that influence policymaking and decisions. I will also refer to examples from Bordeaux and Toulouse to illustrate my arguments.

What is religious “normality”? With their own policies and discourses, and in conversation with others at the national and international level, urban actors establish the boundaries of “acceptable” public religiosity. In this section, I explore how urban governance processes define these boundaries, which are political and have practical implications for people’s religious lives. In examining what falls on one side or the other of the divide, the main interest is in how the fringe is negotiated, defined and contested. The concept of “religious boundary disputes” (Beckford, 1999) proves useful in defining deviant religious practices, highlighting which expressions of religiosity are prioritised, and understanding how these are controlled and policed by officials and citizens (Barras, 2013). Of particular interest are the non-legal dimensions of the question, that is, how social knowledge and its categories are created, circulated and imposed to control certain populations and behaviours. The French state’s approach to religion over the last centuries can be characterised as one of control captured by the term “Gallican tradition” (Bowen, 2007). In France, this role of the state is much stronger than in other countries, although

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the post-9/11 era has shown a shift in the policies of many countries. Along with a trend towards the securitisation of religion, particularly Islam (Cesari, 2009), there is a change in the meaning and implications of the principle of secularism. It is no longer just a matter of state neutrality; in recent years, it has become one that requires and imposes neutrality onto public spaces, individuals and groups (Amiraux, 2016). This shift became tangible during my fieldwork, when one municipal official in charge of the consultative body in Rennes indicated that his aim for the committee was to draft a charter of laïcité that was open and would not “stick to an approach of the coercive dimension of secularism”. As he continued explaining to me, We often appeal to secularism to ban things: “In the name of secularism, I forbid the wearing of religious symbols in schools”. “In the name of secularism, I forbid the wearing of the burka”. . . . We see more and more measures of restriction, coercion, prohibition, things like that, while even the 1905 law is meant to be a law of freedom. Starting out from this interview excerpt, in what follows I explore what the expansion of neutrality to public space and individuals—understood as the delimitation of “acceptable” religiosity—means and looks like in practice. I draw on concrete examples from my research to identify some implicit criteria on the basis of which religious practices are coded, made sense of and regulated.1 Ultimately, the codification and regulation of religiosity results in what Olivier Roy (2013) called the “formatting of religion”. Public expressions of religion are adapted to the standards considered acceptable, which are contextually bounded and therefore reproduce socially embedded power structures. For Valérie Amiraux, “[t]he reading of religion is defined and limited by a political culture that reduces the scope of possible interpretations and therefore ultimately, constricts the behaviours of believers” (2016, p. 41). In other words, the lenses through which religious practices are read establish a reference framework to which religiosity must conform. This template, which should be considered a “provisional consensus” (Martínez-Ariño & Griera, 2020, p.  231), ultimately determines which expressions of religiosity are deemed acceptable, thereby “defining the conditions of citizen belonging” (Amiraux, 2016, p. 46). Too pious, too visible, too demanding Public discussions in France, and Europe more broadly, have shown a clear rejection of religious practices considered “too pious” from a secular selfunderstanding. In particular, bodily practices, especially Islamic ones, remain unintelligible (Amiraux, 2016; Fernando, 2010). Some authors have called this a “‘politics of unease’ around Muslims” (O’Toole et al., 2016, p. 174), which is also evident at the urban level. Most discussions and decisions that I explored in my research had, explicitly or implicitly, Muslims at the centre of attention.

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Moreover, the issue of the visibility of religious practices is key: practices that are “too visible” tend to generate more concern and anxiety. One example of this preoccupation over religious visibility is the study conducted by the Observatoire de la laïcité in France entitled Étude sur l’expression et la visibilité religieuses dans l’espace public aujourd’hui en France2 (Study on Religious Expression and Visibility in Public Space in France Today). Done in collaboration with academics from French universities, the report aims to gain a better understanding of both the presence and visibility of public religious expressions. In the example of the Muslim gardeners previously cited, this concern becomes concrete. Members of the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes saw a clear potential problem with the possibility that Muslim workers would pray during their lunch break. While this position was mostly justified on the basis of state neutrality, the comments made about religious practitioners not understanding that prayer can also be done privately were interesting. The ease with which most of the participants related to the consensus achieved in the discussion is partly the result of what Amiraux (2016, p. 41) calls “the normative representation Europeans have of the religious”, that is, the ways in which the “proper” religious is defined. According to her, this dominant normative understanding of religion in Europe is based on the idea of a singular believer who is ultimately tolerated in political spaces for which the State has absolute authority to draw the borders separating not only the secular from the religious, but to define the forms of religiosity that will be considered socially legitimate from those that will be deemed illegitimate. (Amiraux, 2016, p. 41) The delimitation of the boundaries between public and private is at the core of the religious boundary disputes to which Beckford refers. As one left-wing politician in Rennes put it, the goal of the committee was to “contain the claims made by religious actors and keep those claims in the private sphere”. A different example of the adjusting of religious practices to a secular framework is found in Toulouse. After a discussion in the Toulouse Fraternité committee about the offer of menus in school canteens, the mayor sent a letter to parents explaining the arrangement that would begin the following academic year (2015–2016). Interestingly, while offering the possibility of having a menu without meat so that pupils could benefit from a proper diet regardless of their confession, attention was averted towards the nutritional aspect of food. With that vocabulary, the municipality was watering down the religious dimension involved in the decision to offer different menus. Making choices about food prescriptions based on religion would be seen by many as not only an inappropriate breach of state neutrality, but also as caving in to an unreasonable demands. Emphasising the nutritional aspect made the practice appear less pious, more secular and more easily acceptable to the general public.

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Muslim women’s visible religious practices generate more discomfort and result from a “visual obsession” with their religiosity (Amiraux, 2016, p.  46). Examples of regulations of female attire abound in France and elsewhere, and they are often defended on the grounds of gender equality. Beaman (2016, p. 5) argues that “the ‘equality of men and women’ is a major component of public discourse about the limits of publicly acceptable religious practices”. At the municipal level, female Islamic practices also attract a great deal of attention. In the discussions of the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes, as well as in the resulting document, female Islamic practices are at the core. An invocation of the national law banning the use of full-face veils and its consequences for municipal services, such as the civil registry, is also present in the Toulouse Fraternité’s document Laïcité et espace public (Secularism and Public Space). Similarly, as one of my interviewees, a female religious leader in the city of Bordeaux, put it when discussing laïcité and its interpretation in relation to religious symbols, discussions about women’s bodies reflect societal concerns: the body of a woman is always the sign of a society and when one harms the body of a woman, by hiding it or by daring to speak in its name, for me it is the sign of a society where things are not going well. A concrete example discussed in Rennes in relation to female Islamic attire was the possibility of Muslim mothers accompanying a school class to an outing while wearing the hijab. This was a response to the 2012–056 circular of the Ministry of National Education, Youth and Associative Life with instructions for the start of the 2012 school year that prevented parents who would accompany school outings to show any sign of their religious affiliation. In this discussion of the committee in November 2015, the position of the city officials was to not add more prohibitions and instead favour what they called the “civic participation of parents”, always making sure that this did not imply proselytising. Interestingly, another member of the municipal administration exclaimed: “Proselytising doesn’t always hide behind the veil!”, criticising that the focus was obsessively put on this piece of cloth. Similarly, a Christian leader complained about the ridiculousness of the debate, arguing that it only centred around Muslim women when, in fact, women in other religious groups also cover their heads. In this case, Rennes clearly distanced itself from the broader position taken at the national level. Committee members agreed that getting mothers involved in school activities was of greater interest. Moreover, they argued that neutrality should apply to state employees and not families. In taking this position, the group was rejecting the extension of neutrality towards private persons. These findings show two interesting things: on the one hand, municipalities can take different and even conflicting positions when it comes to the regulation of religion with regards to the central state; on the other hand, cities can take stances that contradict their positions on other issues. In this specific discussion, the Rennes

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committee rejected the expansion of neutrality towards private persons, whereas in other decisions the neutralisation of private persons was accepted uncritically, for example, in regards to the national law banning face covering in public spaces. Overall, while not overtly being the case, most of the discussions about the limits of acceptable religiosity that I encountered in my research are about Islamic religious practices. Louise L. Liebman (2019, p. 392) refers to this situation as “Islam and Muslims as elephants in the interfaith room”. In one of the final discussions, one city official listed the chapters that the Rennes charter would provisionally contain. When reaching chapter number four, the non-official chapitre du foulard (“veil chapter”) was mentioned. This was immediately corrected by others, indicating that that was not the right formulation, which should be broader and refer to religious symbols in general. It should be called the chapter on “ostentatious symbols”, which in the end was published as Les tenues vestimentaires (“Attire”). Significantly, though, despite the broader scope of the final title, most of this section in the charter openly refers to the Islamic veil. The impression I got was that with this honest reference to “the veil chapter”, the “elephant in the room” that Islam had represented suddenly became visible. However, since this was not the politically correct way of putting it, the euphemistic expression of attire was used. What this short interaction revealed was that the veil and Islam were the main focus of attention, though often covered with adjacent discourses. To understand this obsession with Islam, we should also refer to the “‘racial’ dimension of the state” (Amiraux, 2016, p.  48) and how it is intertwined with laws and policies regulating religious symbols. In understanding this, we should not ignore that certain religious minorities, in particular Muslims, are racialised, that is, phenotypical and religious characteristics are blended together and used as a source of othering. The racial hierarchies established by European colonial powers inform how Europeans and their states perceive post-colonial migrants, in particular those of Islamic background (Casanova, 2012; Meer & Modood, 2012). In French colonial history, Islam was seen as a backward religion, something which already fed French racism (Scott, 2009; Sueur, 2001). Moreover, the taboo that the Algerian War still represents in the collective imaginary of France as “the failure of the civilizing mission” (Scott, 2009, p. 66), where the veil was a “potent political problem” (Scott, 2009, p. 89), also plays a role in the way Islamic religiosity is understood in France today. This history and the rising Islamophobic discourses, particularly after 9/11, shape how state policies frame minority populations, particularly Muslims, as a problem and threat (Mazouz, 2017). Finally, certain groups deemed suspicious are completely absent from any of the formal governance structures and decision-making processes that I investigated. While their right to religious freedom is formally recognised, groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and the Church of Scientology are considered in the public imaginary, and also in that of many urban actors, as sects. This is beyond the scope of this book, but extensive research exists on the matter (Beckford, 2004; Hervieu-Léger, 2001; Palmer, 2011). One point of attention, though, is the liminal position occupied by some of the Evangelical churches that fall

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outside of the “radar” of the historical Protestant churches or which are considered to not be “serious” institutions. There is often a reticence to engage with them. As one urban politician put it in an interview with me: There are Evangelical churches a little “olé, olé”, if I can use the expression. But otherwise, there are also Evangelical churches, which are, I would say, extremely serious, organised, institutionalised, and which are partners of the city and who want to live in the city. In sum, some of the measures and discourses in my study have a clear emancipatory aim. The will to publicly recognise the presence of religious minorities in various ways is present in all three cities of my study, with the exception of the groups just mentioned. However, at the same time, there is a clear aim of demanding transparency in order to achieve control of certain religious groups, especially Islam. One recommendation of the Rennes committee in regards of the founding and funding of places of worship for Muslims shows the double dimension of things: on the one hand, the charter recommends that municipalities facilitate the construction of new places by providing public soil; on the other hand, it suggests taking measures of control, such as the signing of a contract between the municipality and the Islamic communities—a measure already in place—to regulate the mode of functioning of the centres, their openness to the city, and the transparency and diversity in their funding sources. This double position of the committee is also reflected in the discourse of urban politicians, who want things to be done “with clarity”—especially with regards to the private funding of Islamic places of worship—and with openness towards the wider society. Amiraux (2016, p. 42) refers to this as “the prism of visibility: a good citizen has nothing to hide”. This exigency of openness and transparency is embraced from within some religious communities, especially some Islamic centres, who are always in the spotlight. It gives them the opportunity to distance themselves from “radical Islam”. Open house days are one of the options adopted to display this willingness to be transparent to the public gaze. However, this also imposes excessive pressure on minority groups, who are tired of having to constantly show good behaviour, commitment to the Republic and good understanding between each other. A Jewish representative in Toulouse complained that he feels annoyed when Jews and Muslims are asked to show in front of the cameras that they can understand each other. For him, this understanding is something normal that should not be presented as exceptional by the media. The demand for visible interreligious understanding is also a form of shaping the conditions under which minority religions are granted a public voice and visibility. In sum, cities, in interaction with the wider legal and socio-political context, establish more or less explicit boundaries to the public religious practices that are considered acceptable (Martínez-Ariño, 2019). Urban actors prioritise individual over collective practices; those that are private, invisible and not too bothersome for the general public are privileged over those that are visible and considered

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ostentatious and excessive or capricious. There is no one stable pattern that applies to all situations, though. The definitions of religious boundaries vary across time and place, and depend on the political constellations and the religious group and practices at stake (Martínez-Ariño & Griera, 2020). However, one evident thing that my research has shown is the shared will to regulate every single aspect of religious practices to not leave room for misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the law.3 This is nothing new to the Gallican tradition of state control over religions. However, researching it in the making allows capturing the complexity of the negotiations as well as the knowledge, working schemas and predominant assumptions that intervene in the discussion of the smallest of details. Translatable religious practices A different criterion to establish the boundary between acceptable and nonacceptable religious practices is their translatability into dominant reference frameworks. During the discussion of the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes on 25 February 2016, a debate took place about the newly built salle de recueillement (contemplation room) in one of the municipal cemeteries. The room, built without any explicitly religious symbol in it, was designed for non-religious ceremonies. However, the Comité was aware that minority religious groups had requested to use it. The Comité was asked to give an opinion on this and whether a fee should be charged in order to avoid subsidising a religious ceremony with public resources. Some committee members argued that anyone should be allowed to use the room, independently of the type of celebration, because once the door closes, the celebration is a private event. Others, however, opposed that view, arguing that the room was designed for secular celebrations and that a religious use of the space would go against its main purpose. When representatives of some religious minorities argued for the importance of being able to use the room, the member of a secularist association asked: Why instead of wanting to use this room don’t you bring the corpse into the synagogue or the mosque, just as Catholics do in the Church, and then simply go to the cemetery for the burial? To which a surprised minority religious representative replied: Because we don’t bring the corpse into a synagogue or a mosque; that is not how things work for us. And if it rains, it is good to have a closed room for a celebration. The person who had suggested following the Catholic model was surprised and acknowledged her lack of literacy on the matter and her incapacity to “translate” this religious practice into something understandable for her. This impossibility

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to understand religious practices is due to the fact that, in France, “common social knowledge limits the ability to read the surrounding world to the secular” (Amiraux, 2016, p.  40). Ultimately, most members agreed that the room could also be used for religious celebrations. The subsequent discussion was whether those who would use the room for a religious celebration would have to pay a fee (the room was free of charge for secular celebrations) so as to ensure that the state would not indirectly fund religious groups. Early on, though, the concern emerged that imposing a fee would be considered discriminatory on religious grounds and against equality. One participant, a member of the state administration at the local level, said, “we go too far with the non-funding of religions”. My interest in this story is in the suggestion of bringing the corpse to the mosque or the synagogue, “just as Catholics do in their churches”. When observing the negotiation of religious boundaries, it became clear to me quite early on that, despite the predominance of the 1905 law as the normative reference framework for most actors, Catholic practices are a model to define what is considered “normal religion” (Hervieu-Léger, 2001, p. 253). In this sense, religious practices that are not easily comparable to well-known Catholic practices are more likely to be deemed strange, suspicious or too demanding and capricious (Selby et al., 2020). Examples of the unequal understanding and assessment of religious practices from different religious groups were common in my fieldwork. The discourse of one municipal bureaucrat clearly reflected the double standards that apply to religious practices. When I asked her about the requests the municipality gets for the use of public spaces (streets, squares, etc.) for religious purposes, she replied: Well, there are all the Catholic manifestations, the processions and stuff like that. . . . It is a procession which takes place, which is well framed and there is no disturbance to public order. And otherwise, it will always be with a view to finding a solution so that people do not pray in the street. You see, for Muslims we prefer to find a rental system, perhaps at the expense of a sports slot, to share equipment. The course of action I think remains the dignity of the people. I understand laïcité like that. Because for the councillor for whom I work, and I speak for the city here, I think that this is really the objective. While the justification for this different approach refers to laïcité and the ensuring of dignity—an intention I do not question—the important point here is the fact that the Catholic processions in public spaces are unquestioned because they are considered “well framed”, that is, easily readable for state authorities. This quotation clearly shows the importance and practical implications of “the ability of the state and its representatives to read and classify certain acts and signs and create a standard grid through which ‘to make sense’ of religion” (Amiraux, 2016, p. 41). Well-known majority practices constitute the “normal religion” (Beaman, 2003, p. 314), as opposed to Islamic (and other minority) practices that are seen as foreign and alien.

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The inability to read and understand certain practices has been referred to as “cross-cultural untranslatability” (Behiery, 2013, p.  776). This depends on the grammars, symbolic repertoires and working schemas that are available for state actors and individual citizens to read and make sense of such practices. The distinction proposed by Statham et al. (2005) and Carol and Koopmans (2013) between “parity claims” and claims for “special rights” made by minority groups is valuable here too. From this perspective, the claims for the recognition of certain minority rights and religious practices that are already granted to Christian majority religions are less challenging for majority populations and the state because they do not question the existing policy categories. Conversely, what the authors call “exceptional demands” have a “greater potential for conflict with institutions and the dominant culture of the host society” (Carol & Koopmans, 2013, p. 167). In the case of France, laïcité, whatever that means in each context, is considered the “neutral standard” (Lamont & Molnár, 2002, p.  176) against which the rest are measured and compared. This standard is, as I have previously shown, neither neutral nor as secular as it is often considered. French secularism is frequently referred to as catholaïcité to reflect the Catholic imprint that underlies many of the institutional arrangements and discourses around religion in the public sphere (Baubérot, 2003). Framing religion as culture Two things characterise most of the examples of boundary setting I have explained so far: they primarily affect minority religions and they constrain certain religious practices. In what follows, I will refer to boundaries that affect both minority and majority religions and expand rather than constrain the possibilities of religious expressions. This expansion is, I argue, a strategy to make certain practices compatible with the law, thereby facilitating the difficult task of discerning how to apply state secularism in practice. This often happens through two interrelated processes that I have encountered in my research: culturisation and heritagisation. Lori G. Beaman (2013) and Avi Astor and colleagues (2017) have examined how majority and minority religious practices are framed differently in law, policies and public debates. Whereas the religious dimension of minority practices is emphasised and therefore often deemed incompatible with secularism, majority practices are often framed as culture, tradition or heritage in order to circumvent some of the limitations imposed by state secularism, such as access to public funding. In many instances, the discourses, policies and practices of French municipalities treat Catholicism as both culture and heritage. In Bordeaux, as in other cities, the municipality provides funds to support the projects of associations linked to religious groups. A member of the government described the kinds of projects they were funding at that moment, including the edition of a book about cathedrals—a project he did not hesitate to justify by indicating that “this is more about heritage”. Similarly, the fact that a big part of the municipal government in Rennes attends the Catholic mass organised on the 8th of May to commemorate

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the victory of the allies against Nazism after the Second World War is a sign of the entanglement of majority religion with notions of nationhood. In these two cases, the religious character of the issue at stake is watered down and other discourses, that is, heritage and the nation, become more prominent. This framing of religion as culture may be done for pragmatic reasons, as when certain decisions that are at the edge of the law are framed as culture in order to fit with the legal framework. This framing primarily benefits majority religions because it provides them “with the rulings and policies they prefer, while upholding the letter of laws mandating neutrality among majority and minority religions” (Astor & Mayrl, 2020, p. 9). This discursive shift mostly works to frame majority religions as culture and thereby preserve their dominant condition (Beaman, 2013). However, in certain contexts, such framing can also be adopted to fit decisions that affect minority religions. In the cases of Rennes and Bordeaux, the provision of municipal funding for religious/cultural buildings is framed as a cultural intervention given the restrictive legal framework for the funding of religious groups. Public officials and municipal employees are aware of this: “we know that in legal terms we are on the razor’s edge”, one municipal employee in Rennes told me. The funding of minority “cultural” centres, which are attached to or contain places of worship, provides a good example of the strategic use of this discourse of “culturalized religion” (Astor & Mayrl, 2020). Relatedly, a member of an interfaith association in Rennes explained to me that the city had subsidised a number of Islamic places of worship, always with a distinction between religion and culture in order “to respect the famous law of separation of church from the state”. He further emphasised that the municipality of Rennes does not have the right to finance the place of worship but it can finance a cultural centre. So that’s political philosophy: What is culture? What is worship? It’s not by chance that in French it’s the same word. The last part of this interviewee’s excerpt reflects on the proximity between the terms cultuel and culturel in French, referring to the religious and the cultural, respectively. This linguistic similarity and the precaution to not reveal the tricks that politicians and administrators make to circumvent the 1905 law force them to use these terms very cautiously. Rennes city officials emphasised this distinction: INTERVIEWEE 1:   The

Blosne Islamic Cultural Centre [Centre Culturel Islamique du Blosne] and the construction project were adopted by the municipal council in 1980. RESEARCHER:   1980. It’s called Islamic Cultural Centre [Centre Culturel Islamique], right? INTERVIEWEE 2:   Cultural [culturel]. REL. INTERVIEWEE 1:   I insist on that. INTERVIEWEE 2:   We only build cultural [culturel] centres but we authorise worship services [exercise du culte] in them.

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Referring to this same municipal policy of funding cultu(r)el centres, another municipal employee in Rennes insisted on the distinction when I asked whether funding existed for worship centres and religious groups: Yes. Well, it’s not for religious groups [cultes], it’s for cultural associations . . . that have worship/religious activities [activités cultuelles] among their activities. We formulated it like that because we distinguish the cultural and the religious [on distingue bien le culturel et le cultuel]. The religious [le cultuel] is not funded at all but one of our missions is to publicise their culture [leur culture], to offer courses on civilisation, Arabic language, meditation and things like that. When we ask them [the centres that receive city funding] about their mission, we ask them to have two well-distinguished columns [one for cultural and one for religious activities]. Moreover, aware of the liminal position in which this policy finds itself, this employee indicated that the contracts with various cultural associations linked to religious groups had been adapted in the preceding years to add a fee to the rental of municipal buildings. In her words, this change in the contract implied that the municipality “finances religion [cultes] a little less directly”. However, she recognised that the boundaries are very thin when she acknowledged that “we’re still on the border of legality but this is assumed by the city. So far, we have not had a legal process, but we could have an appeal and we would see what the administrative court would say”. One religious leader in Bordeaux explained to me that her community would request logistic support from the municipality to organise what she called “a cultural programme”. In the case of this minority religion, and in other cases I witnessed, there is an incentive to emphasise the “cultural” character of certain activities—or to directly present them as “merely ‘cultural’ rather than ‘religious’” (Astor & Mayrl, 2020, p. 8)—to not only legitimise them, but also to increase the likelihood that they would receive the municipality’s support. However, when I asked her how the municipality distinguished cultural from religious activities, she admitted that this was the key question and that it is in this distinction where “the whole complexity of the matter lays”. This framing of religion as culture serves to circumvent concrete limitations imposed by state secularism, especially in France, to recognise religions or to provide them with public funding. However, the issue reflects a wider debate on the contested boundaries between religion and culture. It sheds light on the political nature of this distinction and its implications for religious groups. Culturalising religion for pragmatic and instrumental reasons often serves specific political interests, too (Astor & Mayrl, 2020, p. 5). This discourse also has implications for normative definitions of what is considered religion and what is not; what belongs to the normal, and what does not. As Astor and Mayrl (2020, p. 4) note, this discourse on culture can serve as a resource “for the purposes of boundary-making, nation-building, or the management of religious diversity”. In

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France, just as Marian Burchardt (2020) has documented for municipalities in Canada and Spain, in order to be more easily accepted publicly, religious practices are required to culturalise—to get rid of the religious or confessional components, which are to be kept in the private sphere.

Re-shaping laïcité, redefining the nation Scholarship on migration has shown that there is a divergence between national and urban approaches to immigrant integration. This mismatch is the result of both an implementation gap, that is, the “unsuccessful transposition of nationally formulated policies into local policies” (Poppelaars & Scholten, 2008, p. 336), and differences in the ways these two levels perceive, define and frame a policy problem. However, how this happens in decisions and measures affecting religion is less clear. Do we observe a similar pattern in issues related to religion, or is state secularism a rather homogeneous and cohesive approach across policy fields and politico-administrative levels? Do municipal institutions, directives and administrative practices conflict with national agencies, understandings and practices of state secularism, or do they instead reinforce each other? Or, is there an in-between situation where the municipal and the central-state level are neither in opposition nor fully coherent? And how does the urban level contribute to (re-)shaping definitions of belonging to the national community? This latter reflection is in line with the literature on nationalism, which argues that “national identity, like nation building, is defined relationally and emerges from dynamic processes of interaction and negotiation between local and national forces” (Lamont & Molnár, 2002, p. 181). I have observed instances where national and urban approaches to religion are coherent and one level reinforces the other, and others where the opposite is the case. One possible way to tackle this matter is by situating the findings within the conceptual framework proposed by Kuru (2007), which distinguishes between passive and assertive secularism. Passive secularism is, simply put, an ideology that accepts the public presence of religion, whereas assertive secularism promotes the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. Translated into the French context, these two would correspond with the widely used “categories of practice” (Brubaker, 2013) of “strict laïcité” and “open laïcité”. The examples discussed in Chapter 1, including the funding for local religious groups and their activities, the provision of space in municipal cemeteries, the construction of cultural/religious centres and the inclusion of religious groups in participation bodies, are closer to an “open laïcité” fostering the emancipation of religious minorities. Contrarily, national regulations, including the more recent legal restrictions imposed on the wearing of certain religious apparel in public spaces, are expressions of assertive secularism or “strict laïcité”. While this distinction is often criticised as distorting the “real” meaning of the term, it can be useful to highlight differences among urban approaches. The bureaucrats in my study emphasised that there is a recurrent misunderstanding of what secularism “really” means and that the principle of religious

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freedom is often overshadowed by attempts to restrict religious practices. Verkaaik and Tamimi Arab call this understanding and application of secularism that protects religious freedom by urban actors “constitutional secularism”, in opposition to culturalised debates about Islam, which they refer to as “culturalist secularism” (2016, p. 252). In France, as I have previously shown, we also witness the attempts of certain urban actors to challenge dominant discourses against Islam and the demand of neutrality on individuals. The attempt of some municipalities, certainly the ones in my study, to counter this expansion of the requirement of neutrality is a trait that distinguishes them from more aggressive discussions at the national level. However, cities and their approaches to religion are not ideal spaces of recognition. Assuming this would be misleading and would not serve the analytical purposes of this book, which tries to capture the complexity and messiness of everyday secularism. The more or less explicit definitions of acceptable religiosity that result from urban discussions and policies also impose restrictions. Measures that, on the one hand, could be considered as recognising religious diversity and enhancing its public expression, such as the provision of public funding for religious and minority cultural centres, often come with requirements and heightened state control. Moreover, as demonstrated in previous chapters, municipal decisions are not cut off from national and international political debates and are therefore not made in an “aseptic” environment. The distinction between national and urban governance of religious diversity is, thus, not a sharp one. A second angle to examine the differences between national and urban levels distinguishes between pragmatic versus paradigmatic or normative approaches. Are city approaches to religion more pragmatic than national debates and policies? Scholars in migration studies characterise local policymaking as “pragmatic problem solving” in contrast to more politicised approaches at the national level (Poppelaars & Scholten, 2008). However, this argument has been contested for its simplicity (Schiller, 2015). In addition to their pragmatic motivations and local solutions, cities also contribute to the building of normative ideas about religion, state secularism and the nation. As a member of the Rennes municipal administration put it in our conversation, municipal administrations need to be pragmatic in the application of the legal principles, without disregarding the latter: “you need principles, that I grant. But, hey, you also need to look at reality. In 2015 we are no longer in 1905”. I suggest that this discourse on pragmatism allows decisions that are highly political to be framed as “a-political” and, therefore, less likely to be challenged. In all three of my research cities I found that pragmatic responses were salient because city officials are in direct contact with municipal employees, technical staff and religious groups who encounter the challenges of addressing public expressions of religiosity. Front-line actors face recurrent and urgent dilemmas when required to respond to the inquiries from individual citizens and groups. For technical staff in municipal administrations, the need to solve urgent matters that emerge in their daily work is what matters the most. Questions arise such

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as whether a fully veiled woman can access the municipality for a marriage or whether logistic support to the cultural activity of a religious group falls within the boundaries set by the law. One city official in Rennes indicated to me that “these are very delicate questions for the employees”, who need to make decisions on a daily basis but who feel unsure about what is and is not permitted. They seek advice in these instances from the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes and Toulouse Fraternité—Conseil de la laïcité, governance bodies which are crucial for them. One municipal employee in Rennes explained this to me: Our agents need to have a procedure and benchmarks when they have a person on the phone [asking questions]. Municipal employees really need a response. I hope that this charter will be used for that: to state what the law says, to offer advice or a position so that when the municipal government adopts it, it will display it and give directions to its employees so that they can respond on the ground. Referring to this charter produced by the Rennes committee, one of its main creators admitted that even if “ideology takes over a bit” during its discussions, what concerns him the most is “that the measures suggested be put in place”. He recognises the fragile position some of these civil servants find themselves in when they do not know how to respond to certain requests. For him, too, this charter should provide guidelines and ready-made responses to municipal employees so that they know what they must stick to. Similarly, the Association des Maires de France (AMF) (Association of French Mayors) emphasised the pragmatic nature of its Vade-mecum of laïcité, a report launched to respond to the challenges that mayors and municipal councillors encounter daily. The document is considered a response to the “strong demand that exists among our colleagues for concrete solutions to the problems that arise in local management”. Moreover, the AMF emphasises the need for practical guidance as a complement to the political support of city officials to the notion of laïcité. In their words, While reaffirming attachment to secularism is essential in the Republic, it must still be embodied in all the daily services that municipalities offer to their population. This is why our Vade-mecum addresses the municipal competences likely to be concerned . . . in order to effectively enlighten our colleagues with clear and practical recommendations.4 The words of Natalie Appéré, Mayor of Rennes, very clearly show this discourse of pragmatism: “What we have shown is that in order for laïcité to appease and respect those who believe as well as those who don’t, it needs clear rules, far from caricatures, and passionate debates”.5 In her words, the Rennes “conception of laïcité implies starting out with priority from concrete questions, those that are posed on the everyday life”.6 Referring to pragmatism serves as a source to

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legitimise concrete decisions as useful in contrast to debates considered too politicised and too far from the actual problems of citizens. Importantly, though, while the previous statements indicate a clear pragmatic drive, the preceding analysis also indicates a normative component to urban governance. The latter impacts broader discourses of secularism and the drawing of boundaries between that which is considered acceptable and unacceptable religiosity. Beyond the specific realm of possibilities for the practice of religion in public spaces that they define, these boundaries are relevant because they establish that which is considered to belong to a particular definition of being French and a full member of the national community. References to what is acceptable and French appeared implicitly throughout the fieldwork of my research. However, in a personal interview with a municipal employee in Rennes, a very explicit reference was also made, clearly showing how the delimitation of religious boundaries is directly linked to definitions of national belonging. This employee explained that in order to solve the space limitations to celebrate the Friday prayer encountered by the local Muslim community, the Rennes municipality had decided to temporarily rent them a school sports hall during two hours every Friday. When I asked her if neighbours or any other party opposed such decisions, she acknowledged the difficulties they had encountered: It’s quite sensitive to explain to a school principal that her sports hall, which is used for after-school activities at noon, should be . . . well, in fact, it is not very French—removed some time from children on Friday afternoon so that people can come to pray. Her suggestion that the decision to allow Muslims to pray in the school sports hall, initially reserved for after-school activities, is not very French indicates four important things. First, it implies that new arrangements that change the way of doing things until now cannot become truly French. Second, it suggests that collective religious practices in public buildings, while allowed under certain conditions, are not what is expected of French behaviour. Third, it signals Islamic religious practice as foreign. Finally, this small example demonstrates that cities contribute to defining ideas about national belonging.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined how cities define religious normality; how, in doing so, they converge with or distance themselves from higher politicoadministrative levels of the state; and, ultimately, how they shape notions of laïcité or state secularism and belonging to the nation. I have argued that policies, actors and discourses contribute to defining the forms of religiosity that are considered publicly acceptable, thereby delimiting what religious normality, secularism and

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the nation look like in a particular place and moment. These findings have three theoretical implications. First, cities, and not only central states, are parties in various religious boundaries disputes—the continuous struggle of differentiation/de-differentiation between state and religious actors (Cesari, 2016). Establishing what counts as religious or secular, religion or culture, private or public is the essence of state secularism; with their decisions, urban actors actively shape, change and reproduce it. Municipal decision-making involves political choices that “format” (Roy, 2013) religion in particular ways according not only to the legal framework, but also to the dominant secular culture of the country, the stocks of knowledge available to various actors and the specific local conditions (see Chapter 1). In this chapter, I have argued that the normative definitions of acceptable and unacceptable religiosity draw on various reference frameworks and working schemas that allow a variety of actors to read, decode and make sense of religious practices. In particular, three reference frameworks are at work: one that refers to piety and visibility, one which establishes majority practices as the standard against which other practices are understood and assessed, and, finally, a third reference framework that culturalises certain religious practices to make related policy interventions fit with secularism. Laïcité, or state secularism—a normative framework that is constantly in the making and negotiated on the go—is fragmented and malleable. In this chapter, the starting point has been the discussions I observed in the Comité consultatif de Rennes. From a governmentality perspective, municipal dialogue bodies should be understood as tools to reshape religiosity and, more specifically, the (female) Muslim body (Amir-Moazami, 2011). Examining their work allows deeper understandings of how certain religious practices are made to fit the expected standards and that those which cannot are rejected as unacceptable. Moreover, it shows how instances which could initially be considered forms of recognition also enact “boundary patrolling practices” (Lamont & Molnár, 2002, p. 176), thereby keeping both passive and assertive forms of state secularism alive. Therefore, France should be understood as an unstable secular formation—a “regulatory political project” that organises its subjects despite its contradictions and tensions (Fernando, 2014). Second, the findings in this chapter show the gaps between discourses and policies at the national and urban levels. As I have demonstrated, many of the urban interventions respond, although not exclusively, to rather pragmatic aims, as opposed to rather ideological debates at the national level. Moreover, urban secularism seems more likely—if sometimes only for pragmatic reasons—to acknowledge and accommodate the requests of various groups than the national level. These gaps and discrepancies between levels are not permanent and unbridgeable; there are, as the next chapter will show, interconnections between both levels of governance. Finally, the analysis in this chapter suggests that cities should be understood as “an arena for the (re)definition of national belonging” (Downing, 2015, p. 336),

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where urban policies and normative discourses may reinforce as well as challenge and expand the boundaries of the nation. With their policies and discourses, cities contribute to constructions of national belonging, but they may also, as I have shown in Chapter 3, create a sense of urban pride and a construction of local identities. That is, cities shape notions of Frenchness, but, through urban deployments of secularism (e.g., “laïcité à la rennaise”), they also produce urban citizenship.

Notes 1 Some of the ideas discussed in this chapter draw inspiration from a collaborative project with my colleague at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Mar Griera, where we outlined an analytical model to examine the criteria underlying implicit and explicit definitions of acceptable and unacceptable religiosity (Martínez-Ariño & Griera, 2020). 2 Observatoire de la laïcité. (2019). Étude sur l’expression et la visibilité religieuses dans l’espace public aujourd’hui en France. Observatoire de la laïcité. www.gouvernement. fr/sites/default/files/contenu/piece-jointe/2019/07/etudesurlavisibilitereligieuse.pdf 3 Here it is important to remind the reader that a large part of the empirical material of this chapter comes from my fieldwork in Rennes, a city which, as I have shown in Chapter 1, adopts a rather interventionist approach to religion. Therefore, the level of regulation may vary across cities depending on the local factors I have outlined in that chapter. 4 Association des Maires de France. (2015). Laïcité: Le vade-mecum de l’AMF. Association des Maire de France et des présidents d’intercommunalité de France—AMF. www. amf.asso.fr/m/document/document.php?id=14082 5 Appéré, N. (2017). Nomination à l’Observatoire de la laïcité. Nathalie Appéré. www. nathalieappere.fr/2017/04/nomination-a-lobservatoire-de-la-laicite/ 6 Appéré, N. (2016). Pour une charte rennaise de la laïcité. Nathalie Appéré. www.nath alieappere.fr/2016/12/charte-rennaise-de-laicite/

Chapter 5

From the national to the urban and back How state secularism travels

The municipal ban that several French coastal cities passed in 2016 against the use of full-covering bathing suits generated lively debates at the national and international levels. The controversy was solved by a decision of the Conseil d’État, which suspended the municipal decrees. The top-down action of this centralstate institution was clear and implemented directly in the cities concerned. But what was the influence of such municipal decisions on the national level? Did they change the ways in which national agencies understood religious practices in public spaces? Did it result in any change on national decisions and policy measures, or did it reinforce existing legal arrangements? Moreover, how did this controversy affect the relationship between those municipalities and central-state institutions? While researchers have studied the influence of decisions at the central-state level on urban governance of religious issues, the opposite is not the case. How do decisions made at the municipal level affect policies and discourses at the national level? The upward dynamics between urban, regional, national and international levels is not an evident one, and less so in the realm of policies of religion, which have traditionally been arranged through national church-state agreements. Moreover, next to this vertical dynamic across administrative levels, there may also be horizontal interactions and transfers, where ideas, actors and decisions at the municipal level travel across cities. Are there policy transfers between cities in regards to issues of religion, as has been the case in policy areas such as immigrant integration, where city networks are serving as platforms for the exchange of policy ideas and measures? Inspired by research in migration studies, where the multilevel nature of governance has been the focus of attention for some time now (Caponio & JonesCorrea, 2018; Scholten, 2013), this chapter analyses the production of state secularism in the dynamics between different political and administrative levels. While supranational and global discourses and institutions, such as the European Court of Human Rights, play a key role in governance (Fokas, 2018; Koenig, 2007a), I focus on the interaction between the urban and national levels. Next to the divergences and decoupling between levels shown in the previous chapter, it is important to examine how the ways secularism and the discourses of laïcité are understood, created and implemented travel across administrative levels.

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Multilevel governance, policy mobilities and the circulation of discourses and ideas Claire De Galembert (2003) has identified a few mechanisms through which issues related to the urban governance of religion—in her case, related to Islam in France—scale up to the national level. The first one is the emergence of a conflict, which often involves some form of media amplification and the requirement of external arbitration. De Galembert refers to the issue of the veil in schools in 1989 and how a local conflict scaled up to the news and involved the French Ministry of Education. A second channel is the role of local Islamic actors that have acquired higher status and social capital, and are able to mobilise and access the relevant policy networks nationally. The third mechanism is the role that urban councillors and mayors may play when they also occupy a position at the national level. She also identifies partisan structures as channels for the transit of urban issues to the national level. This exploration of mechanisms has inspired my own analysis presented in the following sections. Policy mobilities refers to the processes whereby knowledge of ideas, discourses and policies is produced and circulates between governance contexts (McCann, 2011; Wood, 2016). Some of these interactions and influences happen in formal settings, whereas others take place in more informal ways and are more difficult to capture. Exploring how discourses, decisions and measures emerging from one particular context travel to other contexts and scales and affect them in a variety of ways allows us to capture the dynamic nature of governance. Much of the urban governance of religious diversity that I analyse in this book happens in the interactions between localities in France and between the different tiers of the state. In what follows, I systematise the dynamic vertical and horizontal interactions between politico-administrative levels in the governance of religion. The ways in which different mechanisms operate may vary across countries and cities, depending on the formal distribution of competences, among other factors. Top-down, bottom-up and horizontal dynamics in governance of religious diversity may happen through at least seven channels: 1) national law enforcement and the application of court decisions, 2) the implementation of top-down policy measures and recommendations, 3) political entrepreneurs, 4) the bottom-up knowledge production and distribution, 5) the mediatisation of local issues and controversies, 6) electoral campaigns and party politics and 7) city networks and interurban policy transfers.

Enforcing national laws and court decisions, reassuring laïcité The enforcement of national laws is the clearest mechanism that central-state institutions and agencies have to influence lower administrative levels, including regions, departments and cities. This traditional form of implementing decisions

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is the most straightforward interaction between administrative levels, particularly in centralised countries like France. The application of national laws in the territory of the Republic takes place through various means and agencies. Ministerial circulars—in particular those of the Ministry of Interior and Public Administration—towards state agents at different administrative levels are the most obvious device to disseminate and recall the legal framework. An example is the 15 March 2017 circular of the Ministry of Public Administration regarding the respect of the principle of laïcité in the public administration sent to ministers, regional, and departmental prefects and directors of regional health services. The circular highlights the duty of neutrality of state services, informs about a new training offer for public employees and presents other mechanisms set up by the ministry to ensure the application of the principle of laïcité. The Bureau Central des Cultes (Central Bureau of Religious Affairs of the Ministry of Interior) is the state’s main institution that is responsible for the formal relations with a selection of religious organisations (Église catholique, Consistoire israélite de Paris, Féderation protestante de France, Assemblée des évêques orthodoxies de France, the Union bouddhiste de France and the Conseil français du culte musulman), and the application of the 1905 law in relation to the maintenance of public order (la police des cultes). The institution responsible for translating the national legal framework into the territorial entities is the Prefecture—the representation of the central government in the departments. The Prefecture oversees the implementation of national policies and the law, and is responsible for recognising religious groups as associations cultuelles (religious associations) and controlling the permits to build places of worship and public subsidies. Moreover, the circular of 21 April 2011 of the Ministry of Interior required the prefectures to install the figure of the Correspondant laïcité des préfets (prefects’ laïcité correspondent), a contact point for people in elected positions, civil officials and the representatives of religious groups, and the person watching over the implementation of the 1905 law. The circular also creates the Conférence départamentale de la liberté religieuse (Religious Freedom Departmental Conference), a space of interaction between local elected officials, managers of public services and the representatives of religious groups to grant the application of the principle of laïcité. The Observatoire de la laïcité is a national agency that is a part of the office of the Prime Minister and supports the French government in its policies and measures aimed at respecting the principle of laïcité. Established in April 2013, its role assisting the government in relation to the application of this principle is more pedagogic than sanctioning or coercive, and often consists of providing advice or an informed opinion on a variety of topics. One of its tasks is to remind state institutions and authorities at various levels of the existing legal framework concerning state secularism, in particular in relation to the neutrality of the state and its officials, as well as concerning discrimination on the grounds of religion. The Observatoire also produces guides that translate formal legal principles and requirements into practical knowledge that can be applied by municipalities and

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urban actors of various sorts. Through communications directed at mayors, the Observatoire makes sure that these guides and practical advice “travel” from national to urban institutions. For instance, in a letter directed to mayors on 12 October 2015, the Observatoire states: Faced with the practical difficulties encountered by some elected and public officials, the Observatoire de la laïcité wishes to establish two guides recalling the responses, framed by law, to concrete cases related to the principle of secularism or the management of religious issues by local authorities and in socio-educational institutions.1 The provisions stated in national laws affect municipalities and their services directly. The 1905 law of separation of churches and the state imposes restrictions on what urban elected officials can and cannot do, and how municipalities can relate to religious groups. For example, municipal school catering services cannot provide menus containing halal or kosher products because—according to certain interpretations—that would imply the indirect funding of religious groups. This, however, does not prevent municipalities from offering “alternative” menus that do not contain products, such as pork meat, which are prohibited by religious prescriptions to certain groups. In Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse, such solutions exist. Similarly, the 2010 law banning use of full-face coverings in public spaces prevents municipalities from allowing users wearing such coverings to enter municipal facilities and use municipal services (such as civil marriage ceremonies). Municipal authorities also report the violation of the law in public spaces. In this sense, the central state makes itself present through the more or less homogeneous application of these laws locally. Finally, next to the well-known example of the suspension by the Conseil d’État of the burkini-banning municipal decrees in 2016, this administrative court has a broader influence on lower politico-administrative levels. When in the early 1980s the municipality of Rennes decided to build an Islamic cultural centre to cater for the needs of a growing Muslim population, the decision was met with neighbour opposition. An association brought the case in front of the justice in 1980, requesting that the permission to build the centre be revoked. Initially dealt with by the administrative court of Rennes, the case reached the Conseil d’État. While in 1988 it ruled against the mayoral decision to grant building permission and in favour of the neighbours’ association, the reasoning of the court was not related to the notion of laïcité and the impossibility of building a place of worship with state support. Rather, the Conseil d’État appealed to zoning regulations and the incompatibility of the building with the city’s land use plan. The court recognised the centre as a cultural—not religious—establishment and therefore a public facility, which highlights the difficulty of state actors to distinguish the two. Since the building was already built, this decision did not have much of a practical impact.

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Top-down policy measures and recommendations Policy implementation through the dissemination of “best practices” is characteristic of governance. The Observatoire de la laïcité provides policy guidelines for municipalities for the implementation of state secularism, ensuring certain homogeneity in the application of this principle throughout the country. In one of its documents released on 19 September 2017, the Observatoire notes the unequal application of laïcité across municipalities and advises the Ministry of Interior to send a circular to all prefects suggesting measures to balance the situation. The Observatoire’s role is also partly symbolic in that it places laïcité at the core of the state—directly linked to the Prime Minister—and offers an image of oversight from the state to the municipalities. It exerts soft power rather than sanctioning those who do not follow recommendations, of which the following guides are examples. The Laïcité et collectivités locales2 (Secularism and Municipalities) guide is an umbrella document that establishes the implications of state secularism and the related legal framework for municipalities and other local branches of the government. In an attempt to provide practical responses to urban officials encountering practical difficulties in their daily work, the guide recalls the legal framework and jurisprudence, and draws on previous controversial cases and explains the solutions found. It touches upon multiple issues, including the manifestation of religious convictions in public services, the neutrality of public facilities and buildings, the management of places of worship and religious heritage, the funding of projects of general interest linked to religious groups, the temporary renting of municipal facilities for religious activities, and the management of cemeteries and school canteens. The second guide is a one-issue document entitled Gestion et construction des lieux de culte: Guide pratique3 published by the French Bureau Central des Cultes of the Ministry of Interior in 2016. Directed to religious associations and state actors involved in the building of a place of worship, the guide recalls the specific legal framework regarding the constitution of a religious association and the construction of places of worship, and offers a repository of “best practices”. It addresses very concrete issues, such as the conditions for founding a religious association, financial matters and the internal organisational structure, the acquisition of soil and the architectural conditions of the building. How much such a guide is used in practice when a new place of worship is to be built is something I could not observe in my research. In 2016, the Bureau Central des Cultes and the then Ministry of Agriculture, Agri-Food and Forestry (now Ministry of Agriculture and Food) published a similar issue-specific guide for the Eid-el-Kébir celebration. Entitled Eid-el-Kébir: Modalités d’organisation et d’encadrement de l’abattage—Guide pratique (Eidel-Kébir: Modes of Organising and Supervising Slaughter—Practical Guide), the guide provides actors with general information about the celebration, as well

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as details about the regulations concerning the ritual slaughter and the organisation of the slaughterhouses. Additionally, the guide presents a selection of cases emerging at the local level, which are showcased as best practices, and a list of ten key points for a successful celebration. The latter include recommendations concerning an anticipated planning of the celebration, an active role of municipalities in its organisation, and the welcoming of customers in the slaughterhouses in a fluid and secure way. Moreover, next to this practical guide directed at economic, political, technical and religious actors, the Ministry of Agriculture and Food also issued a more technical guide entitled Guide pratique de recommandations pour les abattoirs temporaires d’ovins lors de l’aïd al Adha (Practical Guide with Recommendations for Temporary Sheep Slaughterhouses during Eid al Adha), targeted at the slaughterhouses temporarily set up for the celebration.4 More recently, the French Ministry of Sports issued a guide entitled Laïcité et fait religieux dans le champs du sport: “Mieux vivre ensemble” (Laïcité and the Religious Fact in the Field of Sports: “Better Living Together”) in collaboration with the Observatoire de la laïcité.5 The guide, published in 2019, offers a general overview of the legal framework regulating the right to freedom of conscience and religion, the requirement of neutrality for state actors and institutions and its application in the field of sports. It also provides examples and recommendations for dealing with concrete cases, such as the wearing of religious symbols in a fitness studio or as a referee in a competition organised by a public service, and the wearing of the burkini6 in a municipal swimming pool. By reminding what the law allows and prohibits, such an instrument reaffirms the legal principles of the central state. Yet, by offering recommendations instead of sanctions, it sets reference points for action in individual local contexts. Interestingly, the production of the last guide is a result of a previous bottomup dynamic.7 Discussions and concerns at the municipal level and consultations made to the services of the Ministry of Sports triggered the publication of the guide. The use of religious outfits during extra-curricular activities with children and in municipal sport halls came up in the discussions of the Comité consultatif laïcité that I observed in Rennes. Other cases involving religion in the domain of sports made it to the national media, including the opening of municipal swimming pools divided by sexes. An example is the Change.org petition done in 2016 regarding the municipal swimming pool of Mantes la Jolie, which requested that time be reserved for the exclusive use of the pool by women. A more recent controversy emerged after a group of Muslim women, supported by other nonMuslim women, protested in the swimming pool of Grenoble in 2019 to claim their right to freedom of conscience and the access to public services. All these local controversies have had an impact at the national level. Municipalities and their queries force the central state to take a position in these specific issues. Besides the example of sports, the Conseil d’État and the Observatoire de la laïcité were pushed to respond to the situations posed by some municipalities regarding the display of Christmas nativities in public buildings. A decision was released in 20168 stating the conditions under which such a display was deemed

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legal. Interestingly, the distinction between the religious and the cultural character of the display of the nativity showed once more the political nature of this distinction and how a discourse on “culture” often works as a way for majority religious practices to circumvent restrictions imposed by state secularism (Astor et al., 2017; Beaman, 2013). Similar interpellation of state agencies by local actors happens regularly. The Europe Écologie-Les Verts et Alternative regional party faction requested the Observatoire to assess the “Charte régionale des valeurs de la République et de la laïcité” (Regional Charter of Republican Values and Laïcité) approved by the Regional Council of Île-de-France in March 2017. In its response, the Observatoire indicated the aspects which either contradicted or misinterpreted the legal framework in place. The central state also implements secularism through the training of local state officials. Training programmes for public officials, employees of public services, municipal councillors and volunteers in civil-society associations abound. Three examples are the Plan national de formation Valeurs de la Republique et laïcité (National Training Plan on Republican Values and Laïcité) and two MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), Laïcité—Parole des Territoires (Laïcité—Voice of the Territories) and Les clés de la laïcité—Le rôle des collectivités territoriales (The Keys of Laïcité—The Role of Territorial Administration). All three programmes, organised by the Observatoire de la laïcité and the Centre National de la Fonction Publique, offer participants basic notions of the legal and practical aspects of state secularism. Similarly, these national agencies organise seminars where elected municipal officials have the chance to raise their practical questions concerning their duties and those of their municipal governments in matters of secularism. While the ways in which these regulations and guidelines are interpreted and applied in each context may vary significantly, as research on policy implementation has often highlighted (Pressman & Wildavsky, 1973), the intention of the state is to provide a general top-down framework. This in itself is not new, especially in cases of strongly centralised states. More relevant, though, is how often many of these issues are the result of cities and other local contexts pushing the central state to take a position and action on specific issues. That is, policy problems often scale up from the local to the national. In the next subsections, we change the perspective from primarily top-down to bottom-up and horizontal influences.

Urban political and policy entrepreneurs On 3 April 2017, Nathalie Appéré, the Mayor of Rennes since 2014, was appointed member of the Observatoire de la laïcité. While the appointment is not extraordinary, the fact that she had played an active role in the design and implementation of municipal policies concerning laïcité is significant. The bylaw announcing the designation of Appéré as new member of this national body indicated that she, and the other newly appointed members, had been appointed on the basis of their competences and experience.9

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Nathalie Appéré, following the work of earlier mayor Edmond Hervé, had adopted a quite proactive approach to governing religion as part of an overall municipal approach to diversity. The number of policy measures concerning religious diversity put her in a privileged position to advise the national government. In particular, the creation of the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes and the publication of the Charte rennaise de la laïcité, which enjoyed certain resonance nationally, made her stand out as a candidate for the Observatoire. As she put it on her website, this nomination “is a recognition of the approach we take in Rennes, thanks to the Comité consultatif laïcité that I committed myself to create, and which was installed in 2015”.10 She was very much aware of the role that municipal policy innovation can play at the national level. In an interview published in a regional newspaper after the Observatoire had appointed her, she stated, “there is a history and a tradition in Rennes around laïcité as well as an ability to innovate. My conviction is that the innovations and solutions that should feed the national debate are experimented at the local level”.11 Moreover, on her website she also indicated that her aim in the Observatoire was to convey a pragmatist idea of laïcité “on behalf of the Rennes experience”. By highlighting the innovation potential of cities, she suggested that state secularism is not a static policy imposed centrally, but is instead in continuous construction by a variety of actors. She sees the work of the national Observatoire as a space to “discuss good practices, participate in reflection, and bring the experience of our territory”, again highlighting the contribution that urban policies can make to discussions and policies at the national level.12 She explicitly mentions that the Rennes experience could inspire others and become a reference at the national level.13 People are a means through which information, ideas, policy decisions and the like circulate in the multilevel governance of religious diversity. These two mayors of Rennes are two clear examples of “urban political entrepreneurs”,14 defined as actors who hold elected leadership positions in the government and introduce innovative ideas in policymaking and implementation. Similarly, “policy entrepreneurs”, who do not hold formal positions in the government or administration, and who work from outside to promote new policy ideas and ensure that they translate into policy action, are also active in the governance of religion in cities. I will show examples in the following paragraphs. The two types of entrepreneurs have in common their investment in resources, such as time and reputation, to introduce policy change that they expect to produce a future return. As such, while their innovations may remain in the locality where they emerged, they may well transcend the context of the city and scale up to higher administrative and political levels of the state, as well as horizontally towards other municipal entities. Municipal governments are frequently considered public entrepreneurs who produce innovative policy approaches to the challenges they face. Policy innovation takes place when those who develop and implement an idea, whether it is really new or it has been developed elsewhere, considered it to be new (Roberts & King, 1991). In matters of religious diversity, municipal governments and

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administrations often generate new formulas, too. The municipality of Rennes has been particularly prolific in this respect. It should then come as no surprise that the mayor was appointed member of the Observatoire de la laïcité to advise the national government. However, Bordeaux and Toulouse, as well as many other cities in France and beyond, also come up with their own policies and solutions to issues perceived as needing intervention. Political entrepreneurs may also transfer policies and ideas in informal encounters (McCann, 2011). This happened in Bordeaux, where Alain Juppé, a former mayor, gathered experience and brought new policy ideas from his stay in the Canadian province of Quebec. One member of his government told me in an interview that his time there had had a great influence on his policy decisions on diversity: That’s for sure! I am sure because the [Bordeaux] Diversity Office was created just after his passage in Quebec. .  .  . I sought in Girondins heritage, Bordeaux, the bourgeoisie who came from different countries, Protestantism. Maybe his policy is projected into a longer history, but he talks a lot about Quebec. . . . I think it’s 2006/2007 or 2007/2008. And frankly, when I went to Quebec, I immediately understood. There is a proactive policy of living together there. At the moment of his stay in Quebec, Alain Juppé held no formal position in any governmental or state agency that would foster the transfer of those ideas, but the very experience of being there allowed him to import certain views on diversity and its governance upon his return to France and the mayoral service. Identifying policy entrepreneurs, who are located outside of state structures, is challenging since they tend to be scattered. The Prix de la laïcité de la République française, granted every year since 2015 on 9 December by the Observatoire de la laïcité in the commemoration of the anniversary of the 1905 law, identifies such policy entrepreneurs. This prize, consisting of €5,000, recognises projects of different nature and reach, often produced by civil-society associations, schools and companies, that are considered innovative or particularly relevant in the promotion of laïcité. For the Observatoire, one intention of the prize is that the laureate projects multiply and are applied in wider contexts. The prize can therefore have bottom-up effects, as it may transfer the innovations of local policy entrepreneurs into higher levels of discussion and implementation. Laicist associations can sometimes also act as policy entrepreneurs. One such association I researched in Bordeaux was both the result of an informal transfer of ideas and a driver of policy ideas, in itself a policy entrepreneur. On the one hand, the association was created in the image of a similar association in a different department of the Nouvelle Aquitaine region. One of its founding members told me he had been thinking about laïcité for some time, but it was after the meeting with the founders of that similar association and the participation in one of its conferences that he made the decision to create the association in the Gironde

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department: “when I saw their work, I told myself: ‘I need to do the same thing’. It seemed obvious to me”. In other words, the association in Bordeaux resulted from an exchange of ideas among activists about how to function as an association in the field of laïcité. On the other hand, the new association is an entrepreneur that pushes its agenda and policy ideas around laïcité into the agenda of municipal governments. The president of the association described its role as a policy entrepreneur: On a socio-political level, I would say that we have the ambition to help, to provide expertise, a form of expertise on the subject of secularism. . . . We do not have the ambition to do things ourselves [but] we meet mayors, mayors of various and varied municipalities . . . and they tell us “So, what do you want to do?” and I always reply “Well, we won’t do anything ourselves; we will help you do, but we won’t do anything ourselves”. He went on to explain that he saw the role of their association as “decoding” laws and bringing back secularism to the “right place because it was forgotten for very long time”. Moreover, he also explained to me that his association sent e-mails to almost all municipalities in the Gironde department explaining its role and had many requests to meet with mayors. In those meetings, members of the association bring “a kind of catalogue of propositions to elected officials and mayors”, acting as policy entrepreneurs to promote the visibility of laïcité and measures to ensure its application at the municipal level. These examples show how influences may not only happen in a top-down manner, but may also adopt an upward direction or come from informal horizontal encounters. By participating in national agencies, urban political entrepreneurs may influence policies and decisions taken at the level of the central state, which may later be infused back into other levels, such as regions and municipalities. Similarly, by informally gathering knowledge and experiences from other contexts, political and policy entrepreneurs may also be actively involved in the transfer of policies from one location to another.

Producing knowledge, defining reality Information and policy ideas may travel through the production and dissemination of knowledge. Knowledge may influence behaviours, policies and institutions through the definition of policy problems and the persuasion that the measures promoted are the most appropriate. Tracking the impact of such initiatives in individual cities is not easy and would require sustained follow-up on measures taken and the chain of decisions involved. However, we could assume that, even if only slightly, tools that produce and make knowledge available may influence ideas and decisions in more or less implicit ways. Moreover, the production of knowledge and skills does not only happen on a top-down manner, but can take place in bottom-up initiatives, too. Urban actors, both individually and in a network, can

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contribute to the production of new knowledge (Wilson, 2015), thereby highlighting the capacities that cities have in setting the policy agenda. In November 2014, the Association des Maires de France (AMF) established a laïcité commission with the aim “to offer tools and concrete responses to mayors to implement the principle of secularism, which is a value and a rule”.15 This group published the Laïcité: Le vade-mecum de l’AMF in November 2015,16 a document with practical guidance for municipal governments and mayors in particular. It addresses issues such as schools’ extra-curricular activities and canteens, cultural activities and sports, the status of elected representatives, the neutrality of public buildings, and places of worship and cemeteries. Moreover, by reminding municipal politicians of the legal framework and stressing the responsibilities of municipalities, the document is a tool to re-educate them in the principle of laïcité. The introduction presents the work of the laïcité working group as inspired by “the desire to better inform the mayors elected in March 2014” and as “an opportunity to reiterate to the reelected councilors certain rules of what we can qualify as good secular behavior (bonne counduite laïque)” (p. 5). Interestingly, the Observatoire de la laïcité commented on this Vade-mecum and highlighted some aspects that clashed with the legal framework, showing inconsistences in the understanding and application of legal principles. Similarly, in 2015,17 the Association des petites villes de France (APVF) (Association of Small Towns of France) launched an online survey to map the status of the principle of laïcité and the measures to promote vivre ensemble in small cities (with a population ranging from 5,000 to 25,000 inhabitants). Addressed to the municipalities, the report18 of the study, entitled Laïcité et Vivre-ensemble dans les petites villes: Un diagnostic (Secularism and Living Together in Small Towns: A Diagnosis), deal with five key themes, similar to those in the case just described: 1) childhood, education youth and sport; 2) public buildings, services and municipal employees; 3) places of worship and cemeteries; 4) housing; and 5) governance. Next to the production of knowledge about the state of affairs regarding the separation of church and state and state neutrality in cities, this tool also offered some clarity on the law and case law. Resembling the document of the AMF, the report reminds the municipalities of the legal framework regarding school canteens, the wearing of visible religious symbols in schools, the accommodation of religious holidays and the renting of municipal facilities for religious services. Moreover, while not binding, the report presented best practices, such as the creation of the Conseil de la laïcité et du vivre ensemble (Laïcité and Living Together Council) in the town of Sant Jean de Ruelle, as recommendations to be adopted by the rest of small towns. By producing and disseminating practical knowledge, these initiatives can work as bottom-up homogenising tools where the circulation of policy ideas happens in relatively unnoticed ways. Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse have also used the production of knowledge on religious diversity and secularism as an instrument of governance. Through the collection of knowledge from various civil-society organisations, the cities aim to define the state of affairs and come up with policy solutions. Particularly

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salient is the case of Rennes, where public audiences were held with various civilsociety actors before the setting up of the Comité consultatif laïcité. The goal was to collect concerns and knowledge among the potentially affected individuals and organisations. In Toulouse, too, the municipal government asked members from Toulouse Fraternité to share their expertise and knowledge in relation to the provision of different menu options in school canteens, as well as in the production of the practical guide Laïcité et espace public. Finally, at a more individual level, experts and academic researchers can also act as “agents of urban policy transfer” (McCann, 2011, p.  114). As one city employee told me, university professor and director of the Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités (GSRL), Philipe Portier, who “had made a sort of inventory of how certain big cities in France deal with the issue of religious and cultural diversity and the instruments that they use”, visited Rennes and “spent a whole day with the elected official responsible for matters of secularism and religious groups”. Policy ideas may thus also travel through the production of academic knowledge and its dissemination among elected municipal officials and policymakers. This book could itself end up being a policy transfer agent, were it to reach an audience of policymakers and practitioners.

The role of (social) media in the amplification of issues That media amplify local issues is a well-known phenomenon. Whether an issue or event is mediatised or not has a strong influence on its capacity to enter the public debate and political agenda at other scales. In matters of religion, this is also common. Mediatisation not only amplifies issues, it also changes the conditions under which politics take place, and may alter the distribution of power among actors, depending on their uneven capacity to articulate and disseminate their discourse. Moreover, when an issue is mediatised, its representation may gain more prominence and attract more attention than the very issue at stake. Actors may be more worried about how their position is portrayed in the media than about their actual position and the actions taken (Uitermark & Gielen, 2010). An excellent example of this was the explosion of debates around the accommodation of religious minorities in the Canadian province of Quebec that led the provincial government to establish the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences in 2007—the so-called Bouchard-Taylor Commission. Media attention to local minority practices heightened the perception that Quebec was undergoing a crisis of accommodation, which ultimately scaled up local matters to regional institutions. In France, and in Europe more broadly, cases that scale up from the urban to the regional and national levels through the media are recurrent, many of which are related to the religious practices of Muslim women. A paradigmatic example is the role that the media played in the case of the 2016 burkini ban in beaches and swimming pools. Initially a local issue, the approval of municipal decrees banning

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use of “religious swimsuits” became a matter of national and international debate. In France, this generated an upward and then a downward dynamic. First, the issue scaled up from the decrees of the coastal municipalities to the administrative tribunal in Nice and then to the Conseil d’État. Later, the issue came down to the cities again when the court rendered its decision of suspending article 4.3 of the decree. A recent controversy emerged in social media when the regional newspaper Ouest-France published an article in June 2019 featuring a picture of some members of the Rennes municipal government with the children of one of the cityfunded Islamic cultural centres. The piece informed the public of the open-house event organised to celebrate the refurbishment of the centre. While the funding was only partly criticised in media reactions, it was mostly the fact that young girls wore hijabs that generated rage. National public figures with different ideological positions, as well as anonymous Internet users, criticised that the municipality approved of young girls wearing veils, something which, according to some of them, was unacceptable in the Republic.19 Another example of the impact of intense mediatisation is the controversy around the removal of a cross from a public square in the Breton town of Ploërmel. A complaint by the local branch of the atheist association La libre pensée and two other inhabitants against the presence of a Christian cross on top of a statue of John Paul II in a square of this 9,000-inhabitant town attracted intense media attention, not only at the local, regional and national levels, but also internationally. In October 2017, the Conseil d’État ruled that the cross should be removed from that location.20 The controversy gained resonance in national debates, with rightwing and far-right-wing politicians—who claimed that this move destructed “our Judeo-Christian society” (Louis Aliot, vice president of Ressemblement National, previously Front National, 26 October 2017)21—criticising the decision. Interestingly, this controversy made it to the pages of prominent international media outlets, such as The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Huffington Post and El País. The then Prime Minister of Poland, Beata Szydlo, criticised the decision and offered to transfer the monument to Poland.22 A diplomatic row arouse between the two countries.23 The strong popularity and support that the figure of John Paul II enjoys in his homeland was the driving force behind an online petition originated there to oppose the decision.24 Situating France after Iraq and Syria on the list of countries where crosses are removed, the petition, signed by around 101,000 people, asked European politicians “to be mindful (and, respect) the Christian roots of Europe”.25 Moreover, a Twitter hashtag in different languages, including French (#MontreTaCroix), English (#ShowYourCross) and Polish (#PokazSwojKrzyz), was created and testifies to the mobilisation of people across European countries. Actions taken at the urban level, latter ratified by a national institution, can be amplified and translated into mobilisations across national borders. However, without the mediatisation of the decision, it is unlikely that such a local controversy and the decision of the Conseil d’État would have reached a significant part of the Polish population.

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Mediatisation can also happen in the opposite direction, from the national to the urban level. The fear that fierce national debates around geopolitical and security issues, Islam and laïcité would produce unrest in localities was common among some of my research participants, particularly after the 2015 terrorist attacks. From their perspective, these tensions put urban social cohesion at stake and force urban actors and administrations to work to “protect” their cities and their peace, capacity to dialogue and vivre ensemble from those negative influences. In other words, media can filter heated debates at the international and national level towards city contexts, challenging urban actors to react.

Electoral campaigns and party politics While not always easy to identify, electoral campaigns and party politics may also transfer ideas, policy measures and discourses between administrative levels. Election periods and electoral campaigns tend to attract a lot of media attention and occupy a prominent position in public debates. They can therefore diffuse policy ideas and decisions, but also controversies and polarising discourses. This can happen with national electoral campaigns and party politics, but it may also occur at lower levels, for example when there are municipal elections. In November 2016, when Alain Juppé, who was the mayor of Bordeaux at the time, ran for the presidential primary elections in his party, Les Républicains, to become the presidential candidate in the 2017 national elections, a strong campaign against him took place in the media. This offensive drew on local politics to discredit Juppé, who was accused of having very close relations with Tareq Oubrou, the main imam of Bordeaux and a well-known and controversial figure in French politics and Islam. Far-right websites called Alain Juppé “Ali Juppé”, in reference to the Arabic name, and a caricature presented him in a collage with a long beard and a turban. These attacks were not new; Juppé had previously faced strong criticism from the political far-right movement Bloc Identitaire, now Les Identitaires (The Identitarians), due to his initial support for the project of the Grande Mosquée de Bordeaux in 2008. Although by the time of the party elections in 2016 no mosque was built, Juppé’s position towards religious diversity had, according to some of my interviewees, “cost him the primary”. The complexity brought in by the electoral campaign affected urban politics in various ways. A member of a secularist association I interviewed in Bordeaux explained to me that the difficulty of addressing the issue of laïcité with the municipality at that time was due to the electoral campaign: It’s complicated in Bordeaux because the Mayor of Bordeaux has national ambitions. .  .  . Laïcité is an extremely sensitive subject, which cannot be treated at the level of the city of Bordeaux as such because the candidate Alain Juppé will make of laïcité one of the arguments of his campaign. And we also know very well that laïcité is going to be one of the subjects, together

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with others like identity, at the heart of the campaign for the next presidential election. This controversy and media campaign against Juppé scaled up towards national debates through the conservative primary, and made it into the main national media outlets, such as Le Figaro26 and Libération.27 The internal electoral process channelled the urban politics around Islam and the particular position of the mayor, which were discussed nationally and mobilised against him by his main contenders. Urban controversies and policies around religion can have an impact on national debates, policies and elections through their politisation, a process whereby an issue gains salience, is discussed by an expanding scope of actors and generates increasing polarisation (Hutter & Grande, 2014). Moreover, electoral agendas at different levels may affect each other and increase the salience of certain issues over others (Green & Hobolt, 2008).

City networks and intermunicipal policy transfers Finally, next to upwards and downwards interactions, exchanges, transfers and the circulation of ideas and policies may also happen between entities and actors located at the same level. In the field of migration, inter-urban networks, understood as configurations of city relationships and collaborations between city councils and administrations (Payre, 2010), have become common instruments of governance. Three examples are the Cities for Local Integration Policies, the Integrating Cities and the Intercultural Cities networks (Penninx, 2015). In contrast, horizontal policy mobilities in the field of religion have not been explored systematically, although some authors have called for more attention to this phenomenon (Astor et al., 2019; Martínez-Ariño, 2019). Do these horizontal structures exist and do transfers of policies and discourses of the governance of religious diversity also take place? Do we observe that follower cities pursue the steps of pioneer cities in the adoption of certain policy instruments and discourses? The national networks of mayors in France described previously exemplify how policy transfers can take place horizontally without the intervention of higher administrative levels. While these city associations may not be completely autonomous from the central state, their activity often capitalises on the work of municipalities. The participation of mayors in these networks can help spread policy ideas across cities, but these networks may also spread a central state policy towards cities. Thus, they may work as rather autonomous structures or be instrumentalised by central states to ensure a more efficient transmission of national policies. An important aspect of these networks is the “transfer of experiences” (Payre, 2010, p. 266) and knowledge that happens among their members. Interurban networks which deal with religious diversity issues should be understood as structures enabling the circulation of knowledge, public policy instruments and experiences across cities.

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Similar city networks, where exchanges on religious issues between cities take place, exist in other countries. In Italy, for example, the Rete Italiana “Città del Dialogo” (Italian Network “City of Dialogue”), the national branch of the Intercultural Cities project, brings together municipalities working on these topics. Moreover, city networks with a broader thematic scope may also get involved in religious diversity issues. This is the case of the Federación Española de Municipios y Provincias (Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces), which unites over 95% of the Spanish local governments. In an agreement28 signed with the Ministry of Justice and the Fundación Pluralismo y Convivencia (the Pluralism and Coexistence Foundation) on 21 June 2019, the Federation committed to the transfer of knowledge and instruments produced by the Observatorio Nacional del Pluralismo Religioso (National Observatory of Religious Pluralism) to municipalities. It also agreed to the training of officials and the promotion of conferences and workshops to exchange experiences and facilitate the participation of cities in international projects for the promotion of religious pluralism. City networks organised internationally are also key platforms for the circulation of policy ideas, tools and people across national borders. Two such examples are the Council of Europe Intercultural Cities network and the Observatoire international des maires sur le Vivre ensemble/International Observatory of Mayors on Living Together. In both cases, municipal governments of different countries— mostly European in the first one; of a global scope in the second case—exchange practical experiences. In both cases, French cities are members. The Intercultural Cities network published a policy brief entitled “Engaging with Faith and Convictional Communities in the Intercultural City”.29 Among other actions, it suggested the creation of “an interfaith or intercultural council” (p. 2) to advise cities in policymaking concerned with religious issues. The policy brief refers to the examples of Marseille Espérance, a well-known initiative of interreligious dialogue in urban France, and to less-known examples such as the Conseil extra-municipal de la Laïcité et du vivre-ensemble (CELVE) in the French town of Tourcoing in 2010. Similarly, drawing on the Berlin Lange Nacht der Religionen (“Long Night of Religions”) as a best practice, the policy brief suggests that municipalities organise open house days to open congregations to the public. The policy brief also encourages cities to organise public discussions about dilemmas and conflicts surrounding religious matters, similar to the public dialogue forum organised in the Swedish city of Botkyrka to discuss the request of a call for prayer by Muslims. The International Observatory of Mayors on Living Together is yet another example of the increasing relevance of city networks in policymaking around issues of cultural and religious diversity and the so-called vivre ensemble. The Düsseldorf Declaration “Living Together in Cities: Mayors Embrace Diversity and Inclusion”,30 signed by over 30 mayors of this network, recognises the exchange of experiences and knowledge between cities. In it, all participating mayors commit to addressing challenges of diversity by launching a municipal policy to promote living together. This generalised commitment could be

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considered an example of isomorphism, understood as a “constraining process that forces one unit in a population to resemble other units that face the same set of environmental conditions” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 149). Therefore, despite the difficulty to trace the extent to which networks impact the decisions of individual cities, recommendations agreed upon in such fora can become a bottom-up homogenising tool. Finally, horizontal exchanges may also happen beyond formal networks, when, for example, a city “copies” or gets inspiration from what other cities are doing. This can happen through face-to-face interactions but also through other more “mundane” activities, such as contacts via e-mail or access to electronic and hardcopy documents (McCann & Ward, 2013). For example, the coordinators of the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes got inquiries about the body right after it was inaugurated: There was number of elected officials in other cities . . . who wrote to say that they were interested [in the committee], that they wanted to see how it worked, how it was organised, voilà. We had that in the weeks following the creation of the committee. The members of Toulouse Fraternité drew precisely on the work of the Rennes committee in one of their discussions. The coordinator of the Toulouse body included a section of the Charte de la laïcité de Rennes in the working documents of one meeting (Laporte, 2018), a sign that the work done in one city served as inspiration for actors in the other. City networks and informal exchanges can shape urban approaches to religion. While one could assume that similarities across cities in France and elsewhere may be the result of an overarching national legal and political framework, intermunicipal influences may be key too. Policy ideas may travel and policy transfers may take place beyond vertical top-down and bottom-up dynamics. Be it in the form of national or international city networks and their policy briefs, or in the form of more “banal practices of bureaucrats, consultants, and activists” (McCann, 2011, p.  115) such as oral presentations, brochures and PowerPoint presentations, these exchanges of knowledge, experiences and “best practices” show how the central state may not always be the only actor in the governance of religious diversity.

Conclusion Researching governance of religious diversity requires capturing its multilevel dynamic nature. While national laws and directives may be the most influential on a large scale, central states do not have absolute capacity to impose their mandate. Lower tiers may produce innovative ideas, policies, and administrative and institutional arrangements informed by local conditions. However, these contexts do not enjoy complete political autonomy either; they do not operate in a vacuum.

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Rather, policy ideas and practices, discourses and controversies tend to transcend the boundaries of the scale at which they emerged. These policy mobilities can happen through unexpected channels, such as a politician’s stay abroad, a newspaper article or a heated electoral campaign. My analytical contribution is to identify a variety of policy transfer mechanisms. These differ in the direction of the travel: top-down, bottom-up and horizontal. Moreover, while some use formal established structures, for example, legal procedures or media outlets, others rely on informal and less institutionalised but equally efficient means, such as interpersonal meetings or Twitter hashtags. Similarly, while some mechanisms, such as the top-down enforcement of the law, might seem stronger at first sight, their ability to transfer policies or discourses depends on the socio-political context. If widespread distrust affects central-state institutions, municipal administrations might challenge the implementation of top-down policy measures. In contrast, seemingly weaker channels, such as the dissemination of academic knowledge, might at times have a stronger influence in municipal policymaking. The list of seven mechanisms does not exhaust all the possibilities and we may encounter other routes through which ideas, discourses and policies travel across scales. We could think of social mobilisations as diffusion channels in moments of serious political confrontation. Similarly, with their public interventions, famous figures unrelated to the world of politics may contribute to spreading particular ideas or discourses. Some channels may not be relevant at all in certain national contexts due to the specific scaffolding of their state, while others, such as electoral campaigns, may only be temporarily relevant. This systematisation is a starting point to think about state secularism more dynamically. That policy ideas and measures can travel through different channels forces us to expand our thinking. Looking beyond constitutional and legal church-state arrangements and acknowledging the multidirectionality and multilevel nature of the governance of religion instead questions homogenising and unidirectional understandings of secularism, particularly in centralised states like France. Moreover, such an approach is better equipped to capture the chances for innovation that lay at every instance of mobility. There is, therefore, no straightforward answer to the question of whether cities contradict or challenge the central state or whether they support each other. By presenting them as best practices, institutions of the central state may at times reinforce decisions taken locally and facilitate their travelling to other contexts; on other occasions, national agencies may challenge and even reverse those decisions. The same may happen in the opposite direction: cities may challenge or ignore circulars or measures recommended centrally; and, contrarily, they may implement those guidelines to the letter. Overall, the “messiness” and potential contradictions of these interactions shows that neither the central state nor municipalities, nor any agency at any other higher or lower scale, monopolises the governance of religious diversity.

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Notes 1 Letter of the Observatoire de la laïcité to French mayors. (2015, October 12). Guidelines Laïcité and municipalities and Laïcité and the management of religion in socioeducational institutions. https://www.gouvernement.fr/sites/default/files/contenu/piecejointe/2015/11/lettre_aux_maires.pdf 2 Observatoire de la laïcité. (2015). Laïcité et collectivités locales. www.gouvernement. fr/sites/default/files/contenu/piece-jointe/2015/10/charte_laicite_et_collectivites_ locales-octobre2015-v3.pdf 3 Ministère de l’Intérieur. (2016). Gestion et construction des lieux de culte: Guide pratique. La documentation Française. https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/Publications/ Cultes-et-laicite/Guide-pratique-pour-la-gestion-et-la-construction-des-lieux-de-culte 4 Ministère de l’Intérieur, & Ministère de l’Agriculture de l’Agroalimentaire et de la Forêt. (2016). Aïd-el-Kébir: Modalités d’organisation et d’encadrement de l’abattage. Guide pratique. La documentation Française. www.interieur.gouv.fr/Publications/ Cultes-et-laicite/Guide-pratique-de-l-Aid-el-Kebir 5 Ministère des sports. (2019). Laïcité et fait religieux dans le champ du sport: “Mieux vivre ensemble”. http://sports.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/laiciteguide_v3b.pdf 6 The term is used by the guide. 7 This and the next two paragraphs are, contrary to the rest of the section, referring to bottom-up dynamics. I decided to leave them here because they interpellate directly the top-down transfers the section is dealing with. 8 Direction de l’information légale et administrative. (2019, June 27). Laïcité, crèches de Noël, burkini: Décisions du Conseil d’État. Vie Publique.Fr. www.vie-publique.fr/ eclairage/38383-laicite-creches-de-noel-burkini-decisions-du-conseil-detat 9 Arrêté du 3 avril 2017 portant nomination à l’observatoire de la laïcité, Journal Officiel de la République Française. www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFT EXT000034356863&categorieLien=id 10 Appéré, N. (2017). Nomination à l’Observatoire de la laïcité. Nathalie Appéré. www. nathalieappere.fr/2017/04/nomination-a-lobservatoire-de-la-laicite/ 11 Le Télégramme. (2017, April 11). Nathalie Appéré. PS: “ Il y aura des enseignements à tirer de la campagne”. Le Telegramme. www.letelegramme.fr/bretagne/nathalie-appereps-il-y-aura-des-enseignements-a-tirer-de-la-campagne-11-04-2017-11470557.php 12 Ouest-France. (2017,April 3). Rennes. La maire NathalieAppéré nommée à l’Observatoire de la laïcité. Ouest-France.fr. www.ouest-france.fr/bretagne/rennes-35000/rennes-lamaire-nathalie-appere-nommee-l-observatoire-de-la-laicite-4905185 13 Appéré, N. (2016). Pour une charte rennaise de la laïcité. Nathalie Appéré. www.nath alieappere.fr/2016/12/charte-rennaise-de-laicite/ 14 Although there is no consensus in the terminology, I hold to the distinction proposed by Roberts and King (1991). While policy entrepreneurs act from outside the political arena, political entrepreneurs bridge the gap between policy entrepreneurs and the institutions that implement those policies (Hogan & Feeney, 2012). 15 Association des Maires de France. (2015, March 18). Le groupe de travail Laïcité poursuit ses travaux et réflexions. www.amf.asso.fr/m/document/fichier. php?FTP=AMF_13243_COMMUNIQUE.pdf&id=13243 16 Association des Maires de France. (2015). Laïcité: Le vade-mecum de l’AMF. Association des Maire de France et des présidents d’intercommunalité de France—AMF. www.amf.asso.fr/m/document/fichier.php?FTP=AMF_14082_VADE_MECUM. pdf&id=14082 17 The timing of the creation of all these working groups indicates how religion had become, already before 2015, a matter of concern for municipal political and administrative authorities. However, the situation in France after the 2015 terrorist attacks

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18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30

fostered the creation of a denser set of bodies that aim to produce knowledge and recommendations to ensure the application of laïcité at all administrative levels. Association des Petites Villes de France. (2015). Laïcité et Vivre-ensemble dans les petites villes: Un diagnostic. www.apvf.asso.fr/files/publications/LB-DEFINITIF-Lai cite-et-Vivre-ensemble-dans-les-petites-villes.pdf Ouest-France. (2019, July 8). Rennes. Polémique après les portes ouvertes d’un centre islamique. Ouest-France.fr. www.ouest-france.fr/bretagne/rennes-35000/ rennes-polemique-apres-les-portes-ouvertes-d-un-centre-islamique-6436140 Le Parisien avec AFP. (2017, October 25). Le Conseil d’Etat ordonne le retrait d’une croix sur une statue de Jean-Paul II. Leparisien.fr. www.leparisien.fr/archives/ le-conseil-d-etat-ordonne-le-retrait-d-une-croix-sur-une-statue-de-jean-paul-ii-25– 10–2017–7354899.php Aliot, L. (2017, October 26). Cachez cette croix que je ne saurais voir ! RN— Rassemblement National. https://rassemblementnational.fr/communiques/cachez-cettecroix-que-je-ne-saurais-voir/ V. G. avec AFP. (2017, October 28). La Pologne veut “sauver de la censure” la statue de Jean-Paul II à Ploërmel. Leparisien.fr. www.leparisien.fr/societe/la-pologne-veutsauver-de-la-censure-la-statue-de-jean-paul-ii-a-ploermel-28-10-2017-7360368.php Samuel, H., & Day, M. (2017, October 30). France and Poland clash over court ruling to remove cross from late Pope John Paul II statue. The Telegraph. www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2017/10/30/france-poland-clash-court-ruling-remove-cross-late-pope-jean/ Ouest-France. (2017, November 2). Pologne: Une pétition en ligne contre le retrait de la croix de Ploërmel. Ouest-France.fr. www.ouest-france.fr/bretagne/ploermel-56800/ pologne-une-petition-en-ligne-contre-le-retrait-de-la-croix-de-ploermel-5354118 CitizenGO. (2017, November 2). Defend the cross—on John Paul II’s monument— in France and across Europe! [Text]. CitizenGO. www.citizengo.org/en/sc/111812defend-jpii-cross Bastié, E. (2016, November 24). “Ali Juppé” et Tareq Oubrou: Un surnom ravageur et un allié encombrant. Le Figaro.fr. www.lefigaro.fr/elections/presidentielles/primairesdroite/2016/11/24/35004-20161124ARTFIG00175-ali-juppe-et-tareq-oubrou-unsurnom-ravageur-et-un-allie-encombrant.php Equy, L., & Albertini, D. (2016, November 22). Qui veut la peau d’ “Ali Juppé”? Libération.fr. www.liberation.fr/france/2016/11/22/qui-veut-la-peau-d-ali-juppe_1530262 Resolución de 13 de junio de 2019, de la Secretaría de Estado de Justicia, por la que se publica el Convenio con la Federación Española de Municipios y Provincias y la Fundación Pluralismo y Convivencia, para el desarrollo del Observatorio del Pluralismo Religioso en España, BOE-A-2019–9360, Boletín Oficial del Estado 65814 (2019). www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2019-9360 Intercultural Cities. (2015). Intercultural cities policy briefs: Engaging with faith and convictional communities in the intercultural city. https://rm.coe.int/1680493bd8 Düsseldorf Declaration: Mayors embrace diversity and inclusion! (2019, September 5). Observatoire International Des Maires Sur Le Vivre Ensemble. https://observatoirevivreensemble.org/en/dusseldorf-declaration-mayors-embrace-diversity-and-inclusion

Conclusion Urban secularism and the politics of inclusion and exclusion

On 25 February 2016, the Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes discussed the use of the contemplation room in the cemetery at length. Could religious funerals take place in it, or only secular celebrations? Who should define what counts as a religious and as a secular celebration? And, even more difficult, how would the boundary between a religious and a spiritual celebration be established, if at all possible? Wouldn’t the city be going too far in setting the defining criteria? After an inconclusive debate, the Comité agreed that no differentiation should be made between religious and non-religious citizens. Members found it difficult to answer these questions, which shows how fine the dividing line is that generates controversies about religion and secularism. Sociologists have studied the governance of religious diversity from the perspective of the nation-state and focused on church-state arrangements and national secular and religious cultures. While cross-country comparisons have provided valuable insights, these accounts have generally failed to show how people live and negotiate religious issues, such as the one in the previous example, in practice. In this book, I have used ethnographic methods and the emerging literature on urban secularism to investigate how urban actors shape how religion is defined and governed. Cities are not simply the sites where controversies emerge; they are venues for political action. We have seen how officials in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse deal with local conditions and the larger national framework to respond to religious matters. The media and scholars have mostly focused on visible cases, such as conflicts around the building of mosques and the wearing of full-face veils in public spaces, especially since the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in 2015. In this book, however, I have examined daily negotiations of low-profile expressions of religiosity. Discussions around the possibility to pray on the job, the menus offered in school canteens and the use of a contemplation room in a public cemetery demonstrate that urban secularism has the capacity to shape people’s religious lives on a daily basis, in often silent and inconspicuous ways. Urban actors define acceptable and unacceptable forms of religiosity, thereby shaping “the contours of religious diversity” (Beaman, 2018, p.  255) and redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and the nation. An example of this is the

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2019 Calendrier du vivre ensemble (Calendar of Living Together) of the municipality of Bordeaux. It depicts the six faith traditions represented in the interreligious forum Bordeaux Partage next to references to the International Day of Women’s Rights, the National Day of France on 14 July, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the International Day of Democracy, interreligious dialogue in Bordeaux and the 1905 law and the principle of laïcité. In bringing those together, the almanac conveys the message that only those six religions are in line with the values represented by the latter six themes. The findings in this book have taught us three key ideas, which have both theoretical and methodological implications for the sociological study of the governance of religious diversity. Urban actors develop distinct patterns of urban secularism, which draw on and (re-)produce dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion and challenge static conceptions of laïcité and the nation. I elaborate on these three themes in the following pages.

Urban secularism In this book, I have argued that urban secularism is a distinct form of governing religion, which may diverge significantly from the mere implementation of national principles and directives. Cities and their administrations are key for addressing religious controversies and they do so in distinct ways influenced by their surrounding contexts. Despite sharing legal standards and the so-called “world religions” reference framework, across France, some territories are more prone to acknowledging certain practices than others. Urban actors and institutions enjoy a margin of movement and, in making their decisions, they take into account the specific local religious histories, symbolic self-representations, public debates and political constellations. As we have seen in the cases of Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse, with their policy interventions and normative discourses, and in interaction with broader politico-administrative contexts, they are key players of “religious boundary disputes” (Beckford, 1999, p. 24). Interestingly, in framing and implementing some of the restrictions imposed by national regulations, urban political and administrative actors have the capacity to circumvent them. This is what Burchardt, in his spatial analysis of the governance of religion in Catalonia and Quebec, has called “the productivity of legal uncertainty” (2020, p.  95; cf. McIvor, 2020, p.  138), that is, the opportunities that legal ambiguity offers. Thus, it is crucial to examine how state and non-state urban actors engage in the daily negotiations of religion and secularism and how in doing so they may push and expand the boundaries of the law, even if only to small degrees. The changing shape of urban actor constellations is crucial in these processes. The growing visibility and legitimacy of secularist actors—who present themselves as defenders and guardians of laïcité—along with the increasing numbers of partnerships between administrations and religious communities in matters of security and social cohesion, de-monopolise secularism as the exclusive task of

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the state. Governance is not exclusively done through the institutional channels established by legal church-state arrangements, but more and more networks of actors in cities work next to each other to address daily challenges. In this way, religious actors themselves, like the Muslims, Jews or Buddhists who participate in the Commité consultatif laïcité, Bordeaux Partage and Toulouse Fraternité, become carriers of the agendas of municipal governments next to their role as minority advocates. Methodologically, studying urban secularism implies taking into account not only national laws, policies and principles, but also how urban actors deploy and reshape, and local conditions mediate, those standards. As I have demonstrated throughout the book, an urban approach to studying the governance of religious diversity has many advantages. It captures differences across cities and identifies relevant local factors. Moreover, it recognises that policies, contestations and conflicts—but also recognition and conviviality—travel across politicoadministrative levels through multiple channels in formal and informal, upward, downward and horizontal ways. Thus, governance of religion happens through multidirectional paths, which implies provincialising the study of the state as a unified and uniform ruler. Lastly, adopting an ethnographic approach to the everyday negotiations and imaginaries, I have been able to analyse the ins and outs of secularism in the making, not as something given and imposed, but as something that actors at different levels engage with, contest and reproduce. Appropriating the words of a city official in Rennes, this approach to the micro-politics of secularism enables the study of “the daily declinations of laïcité”.

Dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion Urban secularism, just like national regulations of religion, draw on and (re-)produce dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion. Classifications like moderate vs. fundamentalist, cultural vs. religious and convivial vs. communalist help decode, label and govern religious practices. They are cognitive tools that help urban actors make sense of the world around them and respond in what may appear to be straightforward ways. Thinking and acting through dichotomies in governance simplifies reality and prevents the need to address larger issues. City officials and politicians classify religious actors as legitimate governance partners or as suspicious groups. The former are considered insiders to mainstream urban life and ultimately to the national community; the latter are viewed as outcasts in the peripheries of mainstream society who challenge its stability and unity. The notion of “circuits de la ville” that one of my interviewees in Rennes used to describe the formal and especially the informal networks of actors influencing policy decisions clearly describes the duality of a core and a periphery. Being considered a legitimate partner by municipal institutions implies higher chances of getting their support and having one’s own practices considered acceptable. Usually, when municipal actors engage with religious groups, they do

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so because they consider those groups to be genuinely religious, “moderate” and respecting the principles that—at least discursively—conform to the Republic. The drawing of boundaries simultaneously creates and reinforces the religious periphery and ignores or dismisses those expressions and groups that fall outside of the boundaries. While Islam is the focus of attention, other groups, especially Pentecostal churches and so-called New Religious Movements, also remain in the spotlight. Similarly, urban actors create and reproduce a discursive dichotomy around what I have called, drawing on Nagel’s (2018) work, “the myth of living together” and “the specter of social fracture”. These discursive tropes easily classify religious groups and their practices as either contributing to social cohesion and living together or producing disintegration, the rupture of social bonds and, ultimately, threatening social unity. Religion being considered primarily a private matter, rarely is communal life recognised as a source of social cohesion. The discourses of vivre ensemble and communautarisme become placeholders for a variety of ideological positions about the nature of social life, social cohesion, the values attached to the nation, the threats that challenge it and the place of religion therein. The discursive distinction between religion and culture, which in spoken French is difficult to hear—only the letter “r” distinguishes the two terms (cultuel— culturel)—also informs public decisions. Practices, symbols and policy measures qualified as cultural or related to heritage are more likely to be considered appropriate and therefore acceptable than those considered strictly religious, which are considered more likely to contradict or challenge state neutrality (Astor et al., 2017). The “culturalisation of religion” (Astor & Mayrl, 2020) for pragmatic or political purposes is all the more important in a national context that imposes strong limitations on the public support of religion. Lori G. Beaman, who has devoted much of her work in recent years to this discursive shift (2013, 2020), argues that the reconfiguration of certain practices and symbols protects the privileges of majoritarian religions in the face of increasing diversification. Finally, actors often contrast their cities with the national context to distance themselves from heated political and media debates, which they see as disturbing the convivial urban life. They counter the expansion of neutrality to citizens, which they attribute to national legal and political developments, with ideas of urban openness to difference. Presenting the success of cities as spaces of inclusion, measured against the background of an agitated and exclusionary national public sphere, bolsters the reputation of urban governance. Overall, these dichotomies create and reproduce forms of inclusion and exclusion that draw on markers of religious difference. The good, acceptable, legitimate and moderate forms of religiosity are opposed to the bad, unacceptable, nonlegitimate and fundamentalist. While these dichotomies serve practitioners—and, arguably, researchers—to make sense of reality, we have seen that the governance of religion is much messier. For instance, while decisions made in Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse, such as the preference for discrete individual prayer, tend towards the privatisation of religion, these do not apply equally to all groups.

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Methodologically, this finding suggests the need to unpack these dichotomies to understand the larger matters they usually hide. As Beaman (2020) has argued, these dichotomies simplify reality and avoid complex—and often painful— debates in diverse societies. However, as researchers, it is important that we disentangle the different ideologies and assumptions that underlie those classifications. As Chapter 3 and especially Chapter 4 indicate, there are certain latent ideas and expectations that delimit the range of religious practices that are considered acceptable. Despite these oversimplifying classifications, which distinguish “cultural vs. religious”, “moderate vs. extremist” and “promoting living together vs. generating communalist closure” practices, it is important to examine what each of these dichotomies assumes, hides, facilitates and hinders in relation to religion in public life.

Laïcité in the making State secularism is a changing formation the boundaries of which shift depending on the general political atmosphere, the actor constellations and the specific contexts in which it is deployed. While the 1905 law constitutes the cornerstone of secularism in France, its application does not remain immutable. The impact of the various 2015 terrorist attacks changed the shape of laïcité discourses and policies with a greater emphasis put on security and the prevention of the radicalisation of young Muslims (Barras, 2017). Moreover, it opened up a political space for secularist actors and increased state attention to the (re-)socialisation of citizens into the “values of the Republic”—a stronger commitment to laïcité in particular. As Christophe Bertossi (2012) has rightly pointed out, the emphasis on what constitutes “French republicanism” shifts at different moments in time. The same goes for laïcité, one of the components of the Republican ideal. As a form of disciplining behaviours through both the apparatus of the state and the internalisation of norms, secularism is constantly in the making, leading to changing standards of “acceptable” religious practices. The assertion of a Rennes city official that “everyone is ‘laïc’ here, but no one has the same definition of laïcité” captures well this idea that discourses of laïcité and conceptions of secularism are unstable and heterogeneous. French republicanism and secularism cannot be considered homogeneous and coherent normative frameworks. Rather, they form an evolving set of discourses, legal principles and political decisions which frame and regulate cultural difference, religion and the state in various ways. Koussens (2015) has captured this with the notion of the “polymorphism of laïcité”: state secularism can be articulated and deployed in variegated ways across moments in history, spatial scales and issues at stake. Importantly, within the changing shape of secularism, certain discourses gain relevance at particular times as reference frameworks to deal with controversial issues. As we have seen, the discourses of “religion as heritage” and “religion as culture” are a resource that municipal authorities build and use to justify

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interventions that could otherwise be considered on the fringes of the law. Burchardt (2020, p. 25) refers to this as “religious heritage assemblage”, which temporarily serves to address religious diversity in a way that alleviates the anxieties of majority populations around the purported loss of national values and identities (Beaman, 2020). Similarly, discourses around laïcité may shift towards a greater emphasis on living together, as was the case after 2015, when fear of social disintegration became widespread. Finally, the open recognition of diversity, as commonly present in the official discourses of the municipality of Rennes, may also be another relevant component of secularism in certain contexts. From a methodological standpoint, this argument forces us to analyse secularism and the governance of religious diversity as dynamic processes. Rather than studying exclusively formal legal arrangements, we should also pay attention to the ways in which a variety of actors in different contexts make sense of and interpret the reality around them. Qualitative and ethnographic approaches facilitate such endeavours, as they capture negotiations and decision-making before they solidify in formal decisions and regulations. Moreover, these methodologies enable the examination of how actors interpret and apply regulations in their daily work—what has been referred to as the “situated ‘varieties of secularism’” (Verkaaik & Tamimi Arab, 2016, p. 252).

Whither urban secularism? In contexts of increasing religious diversification, growth of so-called religious “nones”, polarisation of identities, the political salience of Islam, and nationalist and xenophobic responses to it in many European countries, governing diversity means more than just delineating the secular-religious, public-private boundaries. Discussing which practices should be allowed in the public space or deliberating which role municipal governments should play in such considerations are not just a matter of demarcating the place of religion in public life. Rather, they involve debates about the nature of a society and its institutions. Establishing the limits of acceptable religiosity reinforces the power of the state, in its multiple tiers, and of other actors to decide what is deemed deviant behaviour, which ultimately entails drawing the boundaries—core and peripheries—of the urban and national communities. With intensifying diversity and religious identities gaining public salience, cities will continue to witness exacerbated controversies over religion and shape its myriad expressions. This will most likely be the case for big metropolises, but also increasingly, as we have seen, for medium-sized cities. It is therefore not unreasonable to think that in the foreseeable future, urban inhabitants will witness increasingly heated debates around the place of religious expressions in public life. Boundary disputes that challenge existing lines of division between the secular and religious, the private and the public, the acceptable and the unacceptable will generate new urban social realities and trigger novel governance processes. How will these boundaries be redrawn? Which actors will take the stage in these

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disputes? How will notions of urban citizenship play out and what impact will they have in broader definitions of belonging to the nation? Like deciding where the limit between a religious, a spiritual and a secular funeral celebration lies and who has the capacity to define that boundary, answering these questions will be a difficult task for practitioners and researchers alike. As we have seen, governance of religion is a complex and messy enterprise. In parallel, as the numbers of those who identify as non-religious or religiously indifferent grow steadily in many European countries and other regions of the world, especially in urban centres, we can expect that for many urban dwellers indifference to such disputes and to religious differences more broadly will be the default attitude. Distanced from any religious reference framework, religious “nones”—as diverse as they may be—might simply ignore such controversies. How will the changing religious demographics in various European countries affect religious boundary disputes? Which role, if any, will religious “nones” play in those struggles? It remains to be seen how these diverging developments will translate into a renewed politics of inclusion and exclusion.

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Index

acceptable religiosity 13, 85, 86, 95, 117–118; cross-cultural untranslatability 88; and Islam 81–82, 83, 84; of Muslim women 83, 84; prayer 79, 82, 94; translatable religious practices 86–88; see also religious normality actor constellations 2, 10, 38, 40, 55; civil-society actors 45, 46; co-optation 38, 49, 50, 54; corporate actors 39; councillors 42; deputy mayors 40–41; economic actors 63–64; Islam 44; journalists 48–49; mayors 40; multilevel governance 80; non-religious actors 39, 46; prefects 41; Protestant minorities 43–44; religious actors 38–39, 42–46; secularist actors 46–47, 48; state actors 38; urban actors 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 80, 85–86, 118–119; urban political and policy entrepreneurs 103–106 allocation of material resources to religious groups 30–31; cemeteries 20; confessional plots 20–21, 26; Espace Diversités Laïcité 30; municipal staff 21; public funding 19–20, 25–26 Amiraux, V. 81, 82, 85 Appéré, N. 93, 103, 104 “assertive secularism” 67, 91 Association of French Mayors (AMF, Association des Maires de France) 93 Astor, A. 88, 90 Bader, V. 3 Barbehön, M. 7, 68 Baubérot, J. 22

Beaman, L. G. 59, 64, 83, 88, 120, 121 Beckford, J. 11, 82 Bell, D. A. 65 Berking, H. 60, 64 Bertossi, C. 121 Bordeaux 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 16, 25; Centre d’action et de prevention contre la radicalisation des individus (CAPRI) 50–51; Coexister 45; confessional plots 26; co-optation of religious actors 50; cultural associations 25; cultural centres 26; cultural programmes 90; “Day of Laïcité and living together” 27; deputy mayor 41; funding for religious groups 26; historical narratives 69–71; immigrants 8; inter-faith dialogue 27–28; laïcité 83; mayors 40; Pacte de cohésion sociale et territorial 70; policies promoting political participation of religious groups 28–29; policies providing material resources to religious groups 25–26; public funding of places of worship 25–26; religious diversity 58; symbolic policies for the recognition of religious diversity 26–28; urban pride 66; vivre ensemble/living together 62, 65 Bordeaux Partage 35, 43, 45–46, 66 bottom-up policy transfer 102, 103; see also policy transfer Bowen, J. R. 72 Bretagne 17, 68, 69, 76 Burchardt, M. 91, 118, 122 burkini ban 1, 97, 100, 108, 109

140 Index Carol, S. 22, 88 Casanova, J., Public Religions in the Modern World 38 Catholic Church 13, 22, 57, 88–89; in Rennes 18; translatability of religious practices 87 cemeteries: confessional plots 20–21, 26, 30–31; contemplation room 86, 117 Central Bureau of Religious Affairs of the Ministry of Interior (Bureau Central des Cultes) 99 Charlie Hebdo attacks 2, 9, 32, 55 Charte de la laïcité rennaise 9, 80, 81, 84, 85 church-state relations 3, 5, 14, 27, 80 cities 13, 57, 73; approaches to religion 91, 92, 95–96; deputy mayors 40–41; governance of religious diversity 14–15; intermunicipal policy transfer 111–113; mayors 40; policy transfer 97; see also Bordeaux; Rennes; Toulouse civil-society actors 45, 65; secularist actors 46–47 Coexister 28, 45 Comité consultatif laïcité de Rennes 9, 23–24, 35, 44, 45, 48, 73, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86, 93, 95, 104, 113, 117 communalism (communautarisme) 5, 11, 37n16, 76; and conviviality 75; and Islam 72–74; and laïcité 75; and religious minorities 74–75; “spectre of social fracture” 72, 75, 76, 120 confessional plots: Bordeaux 26; Rennes 20–21; Toulouse 30–31 Conseil d’État 1, 102, 109; decision on the burkini ban 1, 97, 100 constitutional secularism 92 construction of places of worship, Rennes 18, 19 conviviality 59; and communautarisme 75; see also urban myths of conviviality; vivre ensemble/living together co-optation of religious actors 38, 49, 50, 54; Muslim 50–51; see also self-representations councillors 42 cross-cultural untranslatability 88

cultural centres (centres culturels) 21, 25, 89, 120; Centre Culturel Bouddhique de Rennes 19; Centre Culturel Islamique du Blosne 18 cultural narratives: Bordeaux 69; Rennes 69; Toulouse 71–72 culture 21; framing religion as 88–91 De Galembert, C. 19, 27, 98 deputy mayors 40–41 de-Shalit, A. 65 Dhume, F. 72 dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion 119–121 discourses 77, 121–122; communalism (communautarisme) 72, 73, 74, 75, 76; “fraternity” 29; Islamophobic 84; pragmatism 93–94; religious diversity 10–11, 59; sectarian groups 43; urban pride 65; vivre ensemble 57, 61–62, 64–65; see also historical narratives diversity 4; see also governance of religious diversity Downing, J. 80 economic actors 63–64 electoral campaigns, and policy transfer 110–111 emphyteotique lease 20 European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) 3; S.A.S. v. France 60 Evangelical churches 84–85 Fabrique citoyenne (the Citizens’ Fabric) 24 Fédération Protestante de France 49 Fetouh, M. 45 Fetzer, J. S. 3 Foucault, M. 76 France 58; ban of full-face veils in public 60; church-state relations 4, 5; and Islamophobia 84; national identity 4–5; neutrality of the state 28, 79, 81; secularism 5, 80–81; see also Bordeaux; Rennes; Toulouse freedom, and laïcité 22, 61 Front National 8

Index 141 Germany, Lange Nacht der Religionen (Long Night of Religions) 27 Gestion et construction des lieux de culte: Guide pratique 101 governance 3, 6, 9, 14, 30; and government 4; multilevel 80; policy mobilities 98; of religion 5; religious 3–4, 6; see also governance of religious diversity governance of religious diversity 2, 4, 6–7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 98, 118, 122; actor constellations 39; dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion 119–121; multilevel 80; networks 39; and policy transfer 97; Rennes 17; and soft power 14; symbolic policies 16; typology 33, 34, 35; and visibility 16; see also actor constellations; policy(ies); policy transfer; public policy instruments; regulation Griera, M. 96n1 Haynes, J. 38 Hennig, A. 38 Hervé, E. 17, 20, 61, 104 historical narratives 76; Bordeaux 69–71; Rennes 68–69; Toulouse 71–72 horizontal policy transfer 111–113 human rights, and religious diversity 3 immigrants 7–8, 68–69; confessional plots 20–21 immigration 2, 4, 6, 91; and religious diversity 3 inclusive secularism (laïcité inclusive) 66–67 inter-faith dialogue 26; Bordeaux 27–28; minority groups 52; Rennes 18–20; selection of religious representatives 44, 45; Toulouse 31, 32 intermunicipal policy transfer 111–113 interreligious dialogue 16, 27, 29, 32, 35, 36, 44, 62, 65, 66, 112, 118 interventionist approaches 13, 15, 35; allocation of material resources to religious groups 16, 18–21; documents 15; promoting political participation of religious groups 16, 23–25; public

funding of places of worship 19–20; symbolic policies 16, 21–23; see also laissez faire approaches; regulation; Rennes interviews 9, 81, 89–90 Islam 1, 3, 9, 28, 30, 44, 54, 94; and acceptable religiosity 83, 84; Centre Culturel Islamique du Blosne 18; Centre d’action et de prevention contre la radicalisation des individus (CAPRI) 50–51; communalism (communautarisme) 72, 73, 74; construction of places of worship 18–19; Eid-el-Kébir 101–102; racialisation of Muslims 84; self-representations of Muslims 52–53; visibility of religious practices 82, 83 Ivanescu, C. 21 journalists 48–49 Juppé, A. 28, 70, 105, 110 knowledge production 106–108 Koopmans, R. 22, 88 Koussens, D. 121 Kuru, A. T. 22, 67, 91 laïcité 1, 2, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 21, 24, 29, 31, 32, 35, 46, 47, 49, 52, 59, 76, 80, 83, 87, 93, 97, 107, 121; associations 105–106; and communautarisme 74; “Day of” 27; inclusive secularism 66–67; and national identity 5; neutrality of the state 28, 79, 99; open 91; passive secularism 22; and religious minorities 52–54; strict 91; and vivre ensemble 61; see also state secularism “laïcité d’ouverture” 22 Laïcité et collectivités locales (Secularism and Municipalities) guide 101 laissez faire approaches 14, 15; allocation of material resources to religious groups 25–26; Bordeaux Partage 26–27; inter-faith dialogue 27–28; promoting political participation of religious groups 28–29; symbolic policies for the recognition of religious diversity 26–28

142 Index Lamine, A. S. 42 Les Républicains 8 Liebman, L. 84 living together see vivre ensemble/living together living together well (bien vivre ensemble) 64, 69 Mahmood, S. 1 Malogne-Fer, G. 66 Martikainen, T. 80 Martínez-Ariño, J. 3, 8, 31, 44, 81, 86, 111 mayors 40, 48; deputy 40–41; Vade-mecum of laïcité 93 mediatisation of local issues and controversies 108–110 minorities 13; self-representations 51–52; see also immigrants; religious minorities multilevel governance 80 myths 58–59 Nagel, A. K. 10, 59, 120 “narrative secularism” 2 national identity 2, 3, 4–5, 57–58; and laïcité 5 nationalism 91 neutrality of the state 28, 79, 81, 82, 92, 99 non-religious actors 32, 38, 39, 46, 48, 55, 73 non-state actors 48–49 normative definition: of religion 82, 95; of religiosity 2, 5, 11 Observatoire de la laïcité 99–100, 101, 102–103, 103, 104, 105 “open laïcité” 91 Oubrou, T. 110 Parti Socialiste 8, 18 passive secularism 22, 91 Picard, A. 48 policy(ies) 2, 4, 7, 13, 16; allocation of material resources 16; and “culture” 21; documents 15; soft 13, 14, 23; symbolic 16, 21–23, 26–28; vivre ensemble 61–62; see also interventionist approaches; laissez faire approaches; public policy instruments

policy instruments 31–32, 36; Bordeaux Partage 35, 43, 45–46, 66 policymaking 38; and multilevel governance 80; and myths 59; participation of religious groups 16 policy mobilities 98 policy transfer 97, 114; intermunicipal 111–113; national law enforcement and the application of court decisions 98–100; through electoral campaigns and party politics 110–111; through mediatisation of local issues and controversies 108–110; through production of knowledge 106–108; through urban political and policy entrepreneurs 103–106; top-down recommendations and best practices 101–103 political parties, and religious diversity 8 politics of inclusion and exclusion 22, 23, 38; Bordeaux Partage 27; Conseil de la laïcité 31–32; selection of consultative body participants 24; self-representations 51–52 Portier, P. 108 power: access to 39, 47; soft 4 pragmatism 93–94 prayer, and acceptable religiosity 79, 82, 94 prefects 41, 99 production of knowledge 106–108 public funding of places of worship: Bordeaux 25–26; Rennes 19–20 public policy instruments 10, 13, 14, 15; “Day of Laïcité and living together” 27; soft power 14 regulation 13; documents 15; and secularism 5; self- 4, 14, 54 religion 2, 81; deprivatisation 38; divergent approaches to 91, 92, 95–96; framing as culture 88–91; governance 3–4; normative definition 82, 95 religiosity 2, 5; see also acceptable religiosity; unacceptable religiosity religious actors 38–39; co-optation 49, 50, 51, 54; and laïcité 52; Muslim 44; Protestant 43; sectarian groups 43;

Index 143 selection 44; self-representations 51–52, 53; and vivre ensemble 63–64; see also actor constellations “religious boundary disputes” 11, 80, 82, 118, 123 religious diversity 2, 6, 13; discourses 10–11; governance 2–4, 10; symbolic policies 21–23; vivre ensemble 57; see also urban myths of conviviality Religious Freedom Departmental Conference (Conférence départamentale de la liberté religieuse) 99 religious minorities 38, 39; and acceptable religiosity 84–85; and communautarisme 74–75; framing religion as culture 89; and laïcité 52–54; and religious diversity 3 religious normality 79–80 religious spaces (centres cultuels) 18, 19, 89, 90, 120; public funding of churches 19–20 Rennes 5, 7, 8, 13–14, 16, 44, 47, 49, 51, 61, 73, 76, 89, 108; “assertive secularism” 67; Centre Culturel Bouddhique de Rennes 19; Centre Culturel Islamique du Blosne 18; Charte de la laïcité rennaise 9, 80, 81, 84, 85; civil-society actors 45; Coexister 45; Comité consultatif laïcité 23–24, 44, 45, 48, 67, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86, 95, 104, 113, 117; confessional plots 20–21; construction of places of worship 18–19; Contrat de ville 61; co-optation of religious actors 50; cultural centres (centres culturels) 18–19, 21; Fabrique citoyenne 24; funding of cultural centres 89–90; governance of religious diversity 17; historical narratives 68–69; history of immigration 68–69; immigrants 8; “laïcité d’ouverture” 22; laïcité tour 23; mayors 40; policies promoting political participation of religious groups 23–25; policies providing material resources to religious groups 18–21; policy boosterism 67; prefect 41; public funding of churches 19–20; religious diversity 58; symbolic policies for the

recognition of religious diversity 21–23; urban pride 65–66; vivre ensemble/living together 61–62, 64–65, 67–68; see also interventionist approaches Rennes Buddhist Cultural Centre (Centre Culturel Bouddhique de Rennes) 19 Republican courtesy (courtoisie républicaine) 22 Roy, O. 81 Schiller, M. 10 secularism 1, 80, 91–92; abstentionist 25; “assertive” 67, 91; constitutional 92; French 80–81, 88; and French republicanism 121; inclusive 66–67; interventionist 25; “narrative” 2; passive 22, 91; urban 9, 10, 11, 118, 119; see also laïcité secularist actors 46–47, 48 self-regulation 4, 14, 54 self-representations 51–52; of minority groups 54–55; of Muslims 52–53 social cohesion 2, 5, 31–32, 61; “Day of Laïcité and living together” 27; see also communalism (communautarisme); vivre ensemble/living together social hypercorrectness 52 social media, mediatisation of local issues and controversies 108–110 soft power 4, 14, 23; governance of religious diversity 14 Soper, J. C. 3 state actors 38; councillors 42; deputy mayors 40–41; mayors 40, 48; policy boosterism 67; prefects 41; and vivre ensemble 61–63 state secularism 2, 5, 10, 24, 45, 79, 88, 91–92, 95, 101, 103, 114, 121; Comité consultatif laïcité 23–24 Statham, P. 22, 25, 88 “strict laïcité” 91 Study on Religious Expression and Visibility in Public Space in France Today (Étude sur l’expression et la visibilité religieuses dans l’espace public aujourd’hui en France) 82

144 Index symbolic policies 16, 21, 22; Bordeaux Partage 26–27; ceremonial events 22, 46; Charte de la fraternité 31; educational 23; laïcité d’ouverture 22; Semaine de la fraternité 31 Szydlo, B. 109 Tamimi Arab, P. 92 top-down policy transfer: national law enforcement and the application of court decisions 98–100; recommendations and best practices 101–103; see also policy transfer Toulouse 5, 7, 9, 14, 16, 29, 76; allocation of material resources to religious groups 30–31; Charte de la fraternité 31; civil-society actors 45; confessional plots 30; Conseil de la laïcité 31–32; co-optation of religious actors 50; cultural narratives 71–72; Espace Diversités Laïcité 30, 61; historical narratives 71–72; immigrants 8; inter-faith dialogue 32; mayors 40; Plan Convivencia 71; policies promoting political participation of religious groups 31–32; prefect 41; religious diversity 58; Semaine de la fraternité 31; symbolic policies for the recognition of religious diversity 31; Urban Contract Toulouse Métropole 2015–2020 29–30, 62; vivre ensemble/living together 61, 62, 63 Toulouse Fraternité 30, 32, 73, 82, 83, 93, 108, 113

training programmes for public officials 103 translatable religious practices 86–88 typology of urban governance patterns 33, 34, 35 unacceptable religiosity 75, 94, 117–118; see also acceptable religiosity urban actors 10, 13, 14, 15, 80, 85–86; interviews 9; legitimacy 119–120 urban myths of conviviality 58, 59, 68, 75; Bordeaux 69–71; Rennes 68–69; Toulouse 71–72; urban pride 65, 66; vivre ensemble 57, 59, 76; see also discourses; vivre ensemble/living together urban political entrepreneurs 103–106 urban pride 65, 66 urban secularism 9, 10, 11, 118, 119; dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion 119–121 Vade-mecum of laïcité 93 van Es, M. 51 Verkaaik, O. 92 visibility of religious practices 16, 82, 83 vivre ensemble/living together 16, 29, 57, 59, 72, 76, 112–113, 120; appropriation by religious groups 63–64; in Bordeaux 62; and laïcité 61; in Rennes 64–65, 66, 67–68; respect of alterity 63; S.A.S. v. France 60; in Toulouse 62, 63; and urban pride 65–66 Williame, J.-P. 22, 25